He is 52 years old and a journalist, a journalist with 30 years of experience in the press and magazines. For most of his life and professional career he avoided defining himself as a Christian. He believed in the Bible, he was a person with curiosity about religion and God, but he always left that dimension aside.
During his first marriage, which lasted 19 years, he lived with a large family, professional success, money … But a little over ten years ago he divorced and started a new life, a new advertising business and a new love life. He got married again in 2008. Then came the terrible economic crisis of those years and he lost everything he had. He found himself in the situation of having to worry about how was going to survive tomorrow, and the continuous progress towards a better life which he had known before had been quite broken.
Because of his problems he suffered a deep depression for almost three years. It was a horrible and very hard time, but something happened also there. His wife and he shared the passion to travel and to know different cultures, in that period they only saw those places on television until one day they said: why not go?
It was then that he saw in a movie the most beautiful story he had ever seen, one which showed him without his knowing it what he was looking for. The movie was ‘The Way’ and with it appeared the idea of making a pilgrimage. He still needed two years to get enough money and time to be able to go on the Camino but, finally, he did it in 2015. He started in October, in Saint-Jean-Pie-de-Port, he walked for 40 days and arrived in Santiago on the Third of December.
On the Camino he understood that although the United States is a great country, somehow they live there in their small world, because they are very culturally isolated. In Europe however, on the Camino, you are always close to national borders and live through the incredible experience of being with people coming from all corners of the world, walking together in unity, full, happy to be together, temporarily as a family. It was an incredible experience, he made friends and shared his time with them, but also with God. After the Camino he felt that he could no longer live as before, that he had to live in a new way and become a model for others.
It was a strong and wonderful experience, also physically, but what happened to him after walking so long was not something of the order of a revelation. Actually, he went home wondering what he had found, if he had found anything or whether what he had lived through meant something. As a journalist, what he knows how to do is to write, so he began to write to understand his experience. For two years he wrote a book through the writing of which he could relive experiences, relationships.
Through the experience of the Way and the book which was the fruit of that experience he was able to better understand what he wanted to be. He did not love many of the things that were happening in the United States : the idea of the isolation of his country. He thinks that the people who occupy positions of power often appeal to the worst aspects of the people, impose terrible ways of thinking and demonic thoughts. In Arkansas, locked in an isolated world and with those attitudes, he believed that another way of life must be possible and in the Way he could experience it. Now he believes that the world and the people are good, the experience has made him a citizen of the world. Just think that if for a moment, for once, you can experience that feeling of being a citizen of the world, in the deep sense of being a human being and nothing else, that changes everything.
The experience of solidarity that he lived on the Camino led him, upon arriving home, to the message of Christ, which he now takes him with him wherever he goes. It is not necessary to be on the Camino in Spain: it is about helping each other, expressing kindness even with a broken heart. He who had always left for later to know Christ better, cannot now stop living His message. That puts him in a difficult position and as part of a minority.
He made the Camino again in 2016, this time with his wife, and now he is volunteering in Santiago for three months, enough time to understand a place enough. About this experience as a volunteer in Santiago, he can say that from his first Camino he remembers 3 or maybe 4 hospitaleros who were extremely kind to him, gave him certain life lessons and the desire to be able to give now to others what they gave him. the. He feels like a hospitalero, in the sense that he is a pilgrim trying to give back what he has received.
In fact, wherever he is, he lives in some way on the Camino, after writing his book he traveled almost six months throughout the Americas giving lectures about it. The Camino is now part of his life. It feels like a pilgrim: a pilgrim goes in one direction and perceives (or seeks) the unknown.
Now he is writing another book, a book about the difference between being persuaded of something by others, and that of being convinced by something one has experienced oneself. . He feels himself to be a convinced person, not one needing to be persuaded.
