Beginnings

It was somewhere outside Oklahoma City on the edge of an endless prairie of buffalo grass driving down a black ribbon of asphalt when I woke out of my day dreaming and refocused my eyes back on the road and realized I was driving northeast...towards nowhere. 

This was Oklahoma dust bowl country so it was natural that "the answer was blowin in the wind" as Bob Dylan once sang. Then an old Woody Guthrie song blew in through my open window, " I ain't got no home. I'm just a roamin round, just a wanderin worker going town to town...

These lyrics played in the back of my mind as I robotedly continued driving back towards Illinois, back home, back to where things began. I had just completed a 6 month work gig out in Amarillo, Texas. A devastating hail storm slammed the Texas Panhandle in May of 2013.

A large, well respected national construction company out of Indianapolis hired me on as an insurance claims consultant and to handle their operation in Amarillo. 

After this storm operation was completed in December of 2013 I was offered a tantalizing executive position with the same company in their Indianapolis headquarters.

My career as an insurance adjuster began in 1983 as a worker's compensation examiner. Then, after law school I was hired by State Farm Insurance in 1986 to adjust homeowner and commercial claims.

I was sent all over the country to work on natural disaster operations mainly hurricanes and tornados.

Now, driving on cruise control I was not in the mood to face my issues while dealing with family and so I was in no particular hurry to get back to Illinois. 

In fact, I had no home to go back to. In my first divorce I lost my house and it left me in financial ruin just at a time when I had started up my own independent adjusting company. 

I had lived a scrappy life on the fly in my own private little existence in and out of run down hotels, cheap motels and apartments in whatever town I could find insurance work which even with all this talk about El Nino and global warming, true catastrophes were few and far between. And, money was scarce.

Two of my adult children and my mother lived back home which for me is Morton, Illinois a smallish bedroom community mainly inhabited by Caterpillar employees. Cat's world headquarters is only 9 miles away in Peoria.

Now I was heading back just in time to celebrate Christmas at my old childhood home a comfortable brown bungalow built circa 1908 located at the corner of First and Madison which my parents, Bruce Sr and Lydia purchased in 1958.

I had nothing but time and miles of interstate on my hands as I continued driving across this dull brownish wavy sea of grassy plains. Over and over I reviewed the events of my past life and tried to figure out how I got to this particular point.

Even though the job was offered to me I was told as a formality I would have to sit for an interview. So, a job wasn't waiting for me just yet. I had no wife anymore. I was divorced for the second time 3 years before. My children were grown, gone and had their own lives to live.

So, it would be just me and my 74 year old mother. Mom and I get along fine enough but we were never close. She never quite warmed up to me. But, then again, she did have her hands full in the 1960s and 70s raising 5 children alone with no husband to help out. Dad had died young in an automobile accident in 1967 when I was only 7. 

Mom lives alone in unadorned spic and span home. She is simple, straightforward and buys only what she really needs and nothing more. As a child of the Great Depression she wastes nothing including words and emotion.

She was a skinny, little 3 year old when she and her starving family fled the Ukraine in 1943 as war refugees from the catastrophe of the Battle of Stalingrad a 5 month battle in which both the Germans and Russians suffered in excess of 2 million casualties. 

Two years later after fleeing the Soviet Union and settling in the area of Nuremberg, Germany, Mom and her family endured yet more terror as the Nazi regime collapsed all around them. Huge armies of Cossacks, their mouths frothing blood wreaked revenge as they burst through the iron gates of Berlin. 

Fortunately, my family survived the war and in 1952 at the age of 12 mom immigrated to America.

She was raised with very little creature comforts and in the way of worldly wealth, but with lots of love, albeit tough love and discipline. Grandpa and Grandma saved most of their money and invested in local real estate. So, there wasn't money for eating out or new clothes.

Getting back to my story, I finally arrived in Morton on Christmas Eve 2013 and after some initial fanfare and hugs Mom and I settled down into our usual ways when I would come to visit. 

She, watching the Food Channel while crocheting and me sitting across from her in the den watching TV while reading a book. That's the way it was and that's the way we were. She in her world and me in mine and the twain shall never meet as they say. In a way I always felt comforted by mom's home life routine. 

But, I always felt like an incompetent little boy in her presence even though I had accomplished quite a bit: college grad, attended law school, interned for Governor Thompson, worked for the US Department of Justice for Scott Turow, Tazewell County Board Member, career with a Fortune 500 company, raised 3 children and all the rest. Strange how childhood slights and events work on your pysche.

Soon after my arrival and after the Christmas festivities ended Mom took her leave and flew to Long Beach CA to stay with my sister's family for the rest of winter. This was an annual affair and worked out well for all.

I was now able to have the whole house to myself and Mom could bask in the sunny warmth of Southern California and my sister's unbelievable cooking and hospitality. And, I could finally get some badly needed reading and planning done. 

This would also be a time of reconnecting with 2 of my best childhood friends, Scott Witzig and Mike Kaiser. We all went way back, to the horse and buggy days in Morton, Illinois an out of the way village mostly spared the chaotic upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s. In so many magical ways life in Morton was idyllic.

Mom and I said our goodbyes at the house, and my sister in law took her to the airport. I stayed home and just relaxed. I had 4 months to think, to hike, to sort things out and to have some fun with the boys.

It was about 2 weeks into my vacation from reality when out of nowhere my mood turned troubled, dark and pensive. Where was I headed? When would my life become stable and predictable, if ever? Would I find another wife? I was full bore into an existential crisis.

At a particular point during this "dark night of the soul" while sitting on the couch in the den, bored, depressed and rudderless I picked up Mom's Bible on the coffee table and prayed that God would move my hands as they gripped the Good Book. I was hoping that God's wisdom would intersect with a plan for whatever life and time I had left.

Anticipating some celestial comfort maybe somewhere in Psalms I unexpectedly wound up in the Book of Luke.

Instead of comfort I encountered moral conviction. I read about 12 fishermen and their sacrifice for their friend, following this itinerant rabbi walking town to town around the rocky hills of Judea in Roman occupied Palestine. 

This was certainly not the message from God I was looking for and so I closed the book. Not liking the results, I tried a second time. And, again I opened up to Luke. Bible roulette you got to love it!

I ended up reading the entire book and came quickly to the conclusion that my life didn't even remotely look like the lives these disciples led. The sacrifice I read about seemingly for the first time never entered into my thinking. When I read these passages in the past I always exempted myself from the rigors of such a life by rationalizing that these disciples were extraordinary men chosen by Christ for a specific purpose for a specific time in history.

Me? Well, I was just working for a living and doing the best I could with whatever talents, brains and skills I was given to function in this post modern western culture.

But, now I read that Jesus turned to the crowds following him and told them to sell their possessions and give the proceeds to the poor. God and Mammon. You cannot serve God and wealth at the same time. You cannot serve God and yourself at the same time. Wow!

That's what's wrong. All of my priorities were screwed up. Upside down. My only purpose seemed to be building my own kingdom, humble as it was. God's Kingdom is for the clergy to worry about. They get paid for that stuff.

I was totally transformed in that moment of enlightenment and resolved right then and there to plot a new course. What direction I did not yet know. I just knew it couldn't be business as usual anymore.

The following day I hiked the River Trail into East Peoria 5 miles there and 5 back. I needed the time and the fresh air to sort things out. It was there that I walked into an antique store on Pleasant Hill on my way back to Mom's when I saw a set of books for sale laying on top of a coffee table. Turns out it was 2 volumes of Peter Jenkins's books about walking across America in the mid 70s. I tore into these books when I got home. Wow, what an inspiration for me. That's when I knew I had to hit the road!

Just a week or so prior to this epiphany I took the train up to Red Wing MN to visit my former wife and step daughter for a few days. My step daughter and I loved our short 4 days together but, my former wife and I resumed our decade old fight over the same issues that split us up in the first place. It was not a pleasant time for me.

For the last time I tried convincing her that we should work on reconciliation and restoration. Neither one of us had had a legitimate reason for divorce. At the time it was just the easiest course of action.

But, on the last day of my visit she slammed that door shut on working things out. I realized then I would never be able to resuscitate my marriage. And, it appeared that even God himself wasn't willing to intervene.

She dropped me off at the train depot and we said goodbye and I watched her and my hopes for restoration drive away. The return trip home was incredibly sad and lonely. I wrongly figured I had no future anymore. A great door had closed. Another chapter ended.

If that wasn't enough, that promised job for the contruction company fell through. The bad news came during my layover at Chicago's Union Station as I was waiting for a southbound train. Another door now slammed shut.

While hiking back in Morton on the trail I quietly whispered aloud, "God, what purpose do you have for me now?"  I thought working on my failed second marriage was a God honoring task and obtaining a great 6 figure job finally living a stable lifestyle was just what the doctor ordered!

Apparently, God had other plans for this broken down old man.

That's when I fully and finally decided to do what the disciples did: walk cross country proclaiming the Kingdom of God town to town. My new job was to be a vagabond, a nomad, preaching, living a subsistence, minimal lifestyle on the rough margins of life. A Christian radical! No stability, no promise of permanence all rolled up into one big adventure.

So, when Mom returned from California I packed up my backpack and hit the road walking down old Rt 24 and set my face westward. Go west young man was what I kept hearing in my head as I started on April 29, 2013.

It's been over a year and half since I've been on the road and I have yet to regret my life changing decision. Now, it's December 2015 and once again I'm looking westward to start the next leg of my missionary journey to America. Once May comes around it's goodbye to all the wonderful friends, brothers and sisters in Christ I have met in Idaho Springs, Colorado my newfound hometown.

Spring like they say is the time for pilgrimages. As a pilgrim I'm looking for something, what I know not. I don't need to know. All I know is I'm home wherever I'm at the moment and I'm headed on this winding and crooked road to nowhere towards my home in the future.

The last pic is Mom.

BR Schoenbein
December 16, 2015- Wednesday