I’ve been making more progress with my pictures from last week’s pilgrimage down el Camino de Santiago and the set of pictures on my Flickr account is beginning to grow (although there are still a lot more to come).

I’ve also spent a little time thinking about my experiences and trying to draw out some key lessons to take forward. One lesson I was reminded of was that it is good to hold plans lightly. Sometimes they change for reasons outside your control: you can either rage and fume against the injustice of it all or step forward peacefully to discover how things will turn out.

I probably could have picked that lesson out from other experiences. I can think of myriad occasions, even over the past year, where the unexpected has happened. Sometimes they can be something small and trivial, like the thunderstorm that turned my lunch break into a photo opportunity a few weeks ago; sometimes it can be much more significant, as people’s choices interact together and create new patterns and rhythms of life.

Unexpected changes are unavoidable. In Christian hope, I believe my life is not a purposeless span in an uncaring universe and so I try to respond not with frustration but with a prayer for wisdom and allowing trepidation of the unexpected path to turn into the richness of anticipated adventure.

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