Wonder Voyage Year 1: A Father’s Dream

Wonder Voyage is celebrating 25 years of connecting people with wonder this year. Our blog will be filled with stories of our staff and partners around the globe. We can’t wait to connect you with the stories that make up the heartbeat of our organization. This week, we look at Wonder Voyage in 1999.

By early 1999, Shawn was officially out of a job after ten years of pastoring. This catapulted him into what he called a “mid-life crisis twenty years ahead of time.”

Though it was not yet a recognizable entity, the pieces of Wonder Voyage’s foundation were coming together:

• The mission would be pilgrimage. Shawn drew heavily from his research into Celtic Christianity and Irish culture. Specifically, he took the Celtic tradition of the “immram,” a sea journey in which a hero adventures in search of the Otherworld, and applied it to the concept of pilgrimage.
• The ethos for travel would be that each trip would have its own DNA, unlike the countless “canned” trips other companies offered. Shawn would take the “Indiana Jones hands-on approach” to exploration and treat everything as an adventure. He’d focus heavily on cultural exchange and service for mission work. And every traveler would have the opportunity for in-depth cultural immersion. This differed greatly from what Shawn observed in many other mission organizations, where well-intentioned groups had limited brushes with their host culture.
• Shawn wanted to form genuine relationships with the real people he encountered as he discovered new places. And he wanted teams to do the same.

Those who’ve stood beside us through the years were also stepping into place. In February, Pam and Mike Gentry, the company’s first and most faithful supporters, wrote their first donation check to Wonder Voyage. Around that same time, David and Kim Leeson bought the office its first computer. Others began to pray for the fledgling organization and support them in countless ways.

God put a lot of pieces into place.

But as I read Shawn’s journal for 1999, I found what he considered to be his greatest accomplishment that year: He potty trained his son, Hunter.

All the pieces were falling into place. As the organization formed, Shawn felt he had become a better father. His time with his family trumped his need to accomplish something. This became a vital part of Wonder Voyage’s formation. Personal relationships would take precedence over policy, budgets, fundraising, or advertising, and we would also be content with the day-to-day routine. Every day, every moment, every breath is a gift from God to be treasured or squandered.

So many people drift from spiritual event to spiritual event, starving for God’s presence in the in-between moments. It’s an overly used expression: “It’s all about the journey- not the destination.” But it happens to be true. We spend most of our lives in those in-between moments. The little details and routines that fill our days generally don’t make it into the big sprawling epics, but every day becomes an opportunity for wonder and excitement. The journey is an every single day adventure.