Fear Not
Welcome to another “B” team posting, this time from Ronaldo, the Bureau Chief in Spain. Like the other Bureau Chiefs, I don’t know what my responsibilities include, but I’ll just use the Camino model and put one word in front of another until we get there and then celebrate.
I see the Camino as a life model compressed into weeks instead of decades. Like many, the movie The Way got me into this. Then I met Annie in Six Ways to Santiago. Then I met Phil via Phil’s Camino. Movies delivered a vital base for my Camino experience.
I started in St Jean in September, 2016 and fell in love with hundreds of pilgrims and Spain, Astorga in particular, as a place to live. My Ann met me in Santiago and also felt good about Spain.
I took Ann to see Astorga after walking from Porto in March of 2018 and she loved it too. So we are now living the good life learning the culture and language of Spain.
What seeds can I plant in your garden today that you might harvest blessings from in the coming days, and hopefully share part of the harvest with others?
Let’s dive in deep and bury the thought “Fear Not” in a shallow depression in your richest soil. Many of our friends said we were ‘courageous’ or ‘brave’ for moving to Spain. I disagree. Fear is the sharpest tool in the enemy’s kit and there is lots of it around.
Nothing new, the bible contains the phrase ‘fear not’ some 80 times I am told. Must have been an issue early on as well. I’ll let you find a few of those verses and read them to nourish your seedling and hope that your fearless life is fruitful, that love abounds and that you come visit us to tell us your story. I have not yet met a stranger, fear not.
Thank you all Caminoheads, Rebecca and Filipe for making me feel part of the family. We WILL be at The Veranda next August, fear not.
Ron Angert
Hola All Caminoheads!
The quality of these “Friday Posts” by our B Team contingent is laudable! I”m thinking maybe I’ll get asked to start a C Team after enjoying all these subsequent posts.
The Farmer in me was totally hooked with this paragraph. “What seeds can I plant in your garden today that you might harvest blessings from in the coming days, and hopefully share part of the harvest with others?” That is just sublime, those words right there. Doesn’t it just include everything Camino? Harvesting Blessings from seeds we have sown ourselves, not just for our own benefit, but for the benefit of all those “Strangers” who weren’t really strangers at all, but fellow Pilgrims. Those souls were stoked by the same desire as ours to find more about ourselves as we day after day put one foot in front of the other, and found ways to be helped by others as we in turn helped them.
It’s a great journey we’re all on.
Not scared,
Semper Fi,
PFJ
Dear Ron,
What a beautiful post! Thank you for your generosity! I am glad that Pilgrim Farmer John commented on that paragraph of your post, because I was unsure how to do to comment on both it and your concept of “Fear Not”!
I was mentioning in a comment a few days ago about the “way” we seem to live these days… with so many things creating divisions, instead of common ground… And in creating and promoting, and at times not even doing either of those, but just making these divisions “a fact”, we live in FEAR, and what is worse, we base our “relating” with others on FEAR.
For me, the most powerful antidotes to FEAR is not courage, but TRUST… I can’t just start imaging how the “way” we could live life would be like if we base it on FEAR NOT and TRUST.
Trusting Love,
Cris
PS: So glad Our Boss is a FEAR NOT man and trusted the voices of all of us for the Friday post… Somehow, Caminoheads is an example of how the world could look like if based on FEAR NOT and TRUST.
Hey there Ron, How lovely to swing by the blog and find you here! Well, we are all here all the time, aren’t we? We are connected in ways we cannot know fully, yet can feel them with our hearts. I am not quite the farmer that PFJ is, but I like to consider myself an ‘urban farmer’, and plant things all over my little piece of the world here in LA. I, too, was caught by the reference to planting seeds because of something that happened recently. I got a text from my neighbor-across-the street, Garret. He and Makisha have two wonderful children who have added such joy to my life, as they come over and harvest cherry tomatoes, first putting them in their little basket, then popping them in their mouths as the grown ups chat over a glass of wine or beer on the front porch. It has brought me such pleasure, especially as some of those tomato bushes were volunteers! I think those seeds knew that there would be new neighbors, and were laying out their own type of welcome mat for them! The other day I got a text from Garret asking if he could have a cucumber for that night’s salad he was preparing for his family. I was out but told him to just walk over and harvest one himself. He did, and even though I was miles away I was beaming with happiness that he had done that. We can grow things that we might think will feed ourselves, but in fact we are feeding others! We must be diligent with our sprirtual lives not just for ourselves but for everyone else, too. Thank you, Ron, for the reminder. Much love to you and Ann living la vida calma over in Spain!
I just saw these comments as they weren’t emailed to me like when I make a comment on a post. Thank you to each of you that made a comment and I have to let you know that I woke up one early morning and laying in the dark the ‘fear not’ part came to me. I got up immediately and rough-drafted it out. I had no target audience for it, it just came. A short time later John announced the Friday opportunity and I immediately went and roughed out the beginning and sent it to El Jefe for his opinion. I changed a few words, but that is how the gift came to me.
I’ll be waiting for the next one to pop out and put it in the stockpile.
Great comments from each of you – accept my thanks and invitation to come enjoy Spain some more.