I looked down for a moment, then I said, “When McKale was hurt, you called me. When Kyle stole my business, you called me. You’ve always told me the truth, no matter how hard. I’d rather hear it from you.”

She wiped her eyes. “Oh, Alan,” she said.

“Please. What’s wrong with me?”

She looked into my eyes, her eyes welling up in tears. “They found a brain tumor.”

Epilogue

E P I L O G U E

To learn grace is to discover God.

Alan Christoffersen’s diary

Who am I? Or perhaps a better question is, what am I? A refugee? A fugitive? A saunterer? Henry David Thoreau, in his essay on walking, wrote that the word sauntering was derived from “people who roved about the country in the Middle Ages under pretense of going à la Sainte Terre,” to the Holy Land, till the children exclaimed, “‘There goes a Sainte-Terrer,’ a Saunterer—a Holy-Lander.” Maybe this is the truest definition of who I am—a Pilgrim. My walk is my pilgrimage. And, like all worthwhile pilgrimages, mine too is a journey from wretchedness to grace. Grace. I have learned much on my walk, but most recently, I have learned of grace.

As a boy, I heard my mother sing “Amazing Grace.” She said grace over meals and praised all graciousness. My father, on the other hand, rarely spoke the word, relegating it to Sunday vernacular, with little use in an accountant’s calculated life. But he showed grace through his actions, by caring for me the best he could even when his own heart was broken.

For most of my life I have thought of grace as a hope of a bright tomorrow in spite of the darkness of today—and this is true. In this way we are all like Pamela, walking a road to grace—hoping for mercy. What we fail to realize is that grace is more than our destination, it is the journey itself, manifested in each breath and with each step we take. Grace surrounds us, whirls about us like the wind, falls on us like rain. Grace sustains us on our journeys, no matter how perilous they may be and, make no mistake, they are all perilous. We need not hope for grace, we merely need to open our eyes to its abundance. Grace is all around us, not just in the hopeful future but in the miracle of now.