Tomorrow morning, Doug, my sister Kate, friend Mary Lou,  and I leave for one of those lifetime trips.  We will be journeying to Rome to spend 5 days and then boarding a cruise ship and sailing to Naples, Crete, Ephesus, Istanbul, and then Athens. Even after months of preparation I can hardly believe we are about to leave on this wonderful adventure.  For days now, I have been trying to decide if I should blog this journey or simply go, enjoy and remember.  A big question for me has been wondering if this is a pilgrimage or a vacation.  And finally, I have decided it is a pilgrimage.

My husband Doug has MS, for him to be able to make this trip has taken a great deal of planning as well as encouragement. Because of the unpredictability of the control he feels over his own body and his great fatigue,  leaving home for a few hours, let alone days, or traveling overseas seems almost too much.  But his heart and mine say go.

Before this diagnosis of MS, everything Doug and I did together at home, in the community and in travel could always be tied back to an expression of our faith and our call to serve God.  We met in the Formation for Ministry and were ordained together.  We served as clergy together for many years.  And now we will travel to Rome, to Naples, to Ephesus, to Istanbul (the old Constantinople) and end in Athens.  We go to walk in the steps of the disciples that came before us.  And so it is that I will call this a pilgrimage. I believe that as God has called us in the past to seek a deeper knowledge of truth and to see and know something we could not imagine, God is now calling us to this new experience.  And so tomorrow we leave on pilgrimage; to touch a relic, to see a vision, to hear an oracle and to experience the divine in a three dimensional space.  We leave with anticipation and trepidation, knowing that this journey will have challenges as all pilgrimages do.  This one with  the challenge of the disease.

I pray now that the wonderful experiences will far out-way the struggle and that the struggle will lead us closer to the divine.  May it be so...