No Room at the Inn

I understand now why so many people come and walk this camino. No where else have I experienced such an embrace among strangers. It is actually what I dream a church should be like;some struggle and in minutes someone is there drawing alongside, offering assistance, from water to food to encouragement to get up and carry on, to actually tarrying awhile, putting their own camino on hold, to help another.
I spent yesterday morning walking with an Irish guy who is 32. He is looking for direction in life, having been made redundant from a high-flying software engineers job. He talked of the danger of finding your identity in your work and how it took this wake up call for him to realise he was giving his life, his soul his all to a company who pretended to care about him- at least they cared until he was not needed anymore. For many of these people God is identified by the church. A church that is completely irrelevant to their lives. The church is rejected and so by proxy is God. And yet there was something missing and he couldn´t put his finger on it. We talked at length about what love was and what it was like to be married and committed to one other person like no one else as opposed to serial unmarried monogamy which he, like many of his peers lived without question. Our deep conversation ended with a key question and I asked his permission if I could pray for him along my own camino, that by the end of his own, he would be be enlightened re his own seeking. He was delighted and that is another amazing thing I have found -people are very happy for you to pray for them if they say they believe in God or not. I then learnt so much about the technological world from him and it was mind blowing as you went deeper and deeper, but it all eventually came back to algorithms, no matter how complex the surface action was. I also learnt the latest wacky tech speak such as tethering and bumping, so I am now super cool and whizzy!
I wanted to walk further so we parted ways and I walked alone another 10km to what I thought was my resting place for the night. But alas there was ´no room in the inn´. I had already walked 32km in  a temperature of 29celsius, so another 12km walk was not incredibly welcome. But God is good and walking into the bar for a half of Cerveza before the last slog (yes completely unadvisable but hey!), I got chatting to Patrick (aka Dave Migley), who also had no bed, so we agreed to walk together. En route, Ryan from Canada joined us. He had been volunteering at Vimy- something to do with Canadians and the war and he had so kindly given up his bed to a more needy pigrim who had sat in the bar and wept on hearing there were no beds left. Finally Thierry from France joined us and he is the Jamie Oliver of French school dinners! He had already walked 1000km from Brittany so this was a breeze. He was very kind and encouraging and we laughed a lot together-that really helped and we watched as 3 Red Kites soared in the sky. Dinner was such an inclusive, wacky affair with 2 Brits, a Spaniard an Italian a French man and a Canadian. Again a picture of heaven- for me anyway, also as wine here is SOOOOO cheap, so cheap in fact that passing out of Estella there is a wine fountain. Really it is a fountain that delivers wine not water coutesy of the Bodegas family! I have a picture to prove it!!
So at this point I want to thank my family for all those Sparta ski holidays- up at 6am, on the slopes for the first lift, a drink of water and a Mars bar (from Asda) on the lift between pistes at lunchtime and finish as the lifts close! What a fantastic preparation for The Camino. Also the knowledge of being held by God enabled me to walk 45km yesterday in heat. If you had asked me if I could do that pre Camino I would have said no.
Much love, Kate