Learning As We Go

I stood with family as the sun came up on Easter Sunday, listening to the words from a minister about the opportunities of the day and Christ's eternal sacrifice for us. It was a beautiful morning, overcast and darkened by black and gray clouds except at the horizon. The sunrise is proof that God kept his promise to us.

My eldest is traveling to Mexico next week via a $500 motorcycle he found on CraigsList. He is driving from the SF bay area to Cabo San Lucas and back, on some of the more well traveled roads, he tells me, with a loosely planned itinerary. He is an inexperienced motorcyclist with a wild card bike. He will be traveling down with one friend, who plans to fly home after the vacation; a second friend will fly down and ride home with him bringing back the second bike.

All of us have been reading about the drug cartels in Mexico at the moment, and there are plenty of stories of them attacking and taking from people their vehicles, their money and their lives. It is indiscriminate violence as the cartels exert control over a spreading region horizontally across the northern part of the country nearing the US border but also working south into the country. In recent months missionaries and buses of locals have been slaughtered and mass graves have been unearthed along the roadways and young men taken by force and into servitude for the drug trafficking trade.

I have a friend with a son in South America, without a plan, or an itinerary, or a way to call. He occasionally posts pictures from his travels and is spending time in the company of kind people he meets along the way. I am going to give her a call and see how she does it.

I accept that life is about learning as we go, but I cannot process and come to terms with the anxiety gripping my heart. I do not want to hear it will be a fun adventure. Do not tell my son in my presence that boys will be boys.

There is no contingency plan, no international cell phone, no experience on a bike and only a marginal understanding of the language. When something goes wrong, how will we search for him? And what if he finds himself in the wrong place at the wrong time? I have a feeling this is going to be a very long two weeks.

Lord, Hear My Prayer.