Adrian

If you’re starting a nonprofit temp agency, Adrian, Texas has a lot to teach you.

Derek and I left Charleston on May 17 on a cross-country road trip. The plan was to visit three other nonprofit temp agencies, see the country, and build up the momentum to propel IES from concept to reality. I had initially refused to go, denouncing the whole endeavor as financially reckless. Derek convinced me, though. The day before we left he preached a sermon at the storied St. Michael’s Episcopal of downtown Charleston. Watch the video. It’s a great message and gives you a sense of how persuasive he can be when he starts talking about embracing risk. (As a side-note, if you listen carefully to the video, you’ll hear him say that we’re going to get into “our car,” and I whisper “my car.”)



Two days later we were cruising across the Texas Panhandle. Amarillo, the Cadillac Ranch, and signs for FREE 72 OZ STEAKS came and went, and the hamlet of Adrian would have come and gone as well if the speedometer hadn’t stopped working. We pulled over. Smoke rolled out from under the hood. It looked as if someone had spilled coffee on my transmission.

I had the car towed back to Amarillo. The next day Tom the mechanic rather insensitively proclaimed the death of my 1999 Mazda 626. (“Smell that? That’s the smell of death.” He would charge me $70 for that piece of nasal wizardry.) I began to wish that I had not replaced the exhaust system just prior to leaving on this trip. I began to wish that I had not swooned over Derek’s riskophilia and come half way across the country to lose the most valuable piece of property that I owned. Amarillo was an ugly town.

I purchased a used Ford Focus that afternoon. The next day we drove to Phoenix, and many gifts were given unto us during the rest of the trip.

There’s an obvious moral to the story, a restatement of what Derek talks about in his sermon: risk sometimes incurs loss, but better to lose in boldness - and still reap some of the fruits of boldness - than never to play out of fear. That’s an important moral, especially in light of the difficult steps that we will need to take to get IES off the ground in the next few weeks. But quite honestly, that was a lesson I had learned prior to the demise of my vehicle.

Still, part of me needed that car to break down. Part of me needed the rotten parts of the trip if only to force me to appreciate the real value of the journey. My favorite scene in TH White’s The Once and Future King features Lancelot, the greatest knight ever known, relating the story of his unthinkable defeat during a quest in which Lancelot had made great sacrifices to maintain spiritual purity. When Guinevere asks what his reaction was, he replies, “I knelt down in the water of Mortoise, Jenny, where he had knocked me – and I thanked God for the adventure.”

I’m no Lancelot, and I need to do a better job of being grateful for the adventure.