Taking to the road

Journeys with a Tin Can Pilgrim: from corporate lawyer to Airstream nomad finding joy in everyday life
Lynda Rozell
St John’s Press
2021
ISBN 9781955027021

---

As the title suggests, this is the story of how a highly successful corporate lawyer gave it all up for a life on the road but left it all to embark on a totally different lifestyle travelling across America spreading the Word of God. It is an extraordinary story in many ways.

Lynda starts out as a young newly married very successful corporate lawyer in Washington, with a high salary and lifestyle to match – something she and her husband took full advantage of with huge dedication to her work, enjoying expensive holidays, fine dining, good reviews until she broke a finger horse riding, which forced her to take time out, think and reflect. She had lost her faith in God, ignoring a sign in front of a church she regularly passed on her way to therapy which read: “Inactive Catholics, rediscover your Church: We welcome you home.”

She ignored it but it registered when tragedy struck a close young colleague of hers, David, on a climbing accident when he died of a heart attack aged 33. Lynda was devastated and responded to an inner voice saying “go to church and pray for him”. She did, in her grief, sobbing, and angry with God but talking to Him and asking God to take care of David and his family, with a promise to start going to church again.

The death of David was the start of a radical conversion for Lynda … a journey which cost her her marriage as her husband could not deal with this changed wife, despite her best efforts to save it for herself and their two young children – she was heartbroken.

A feature of this book is the quote at the start of each chapter to match the episode that followed. In this early chapter her quote from Victor Frankl read:“When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.”

And thus her radical choices began, purchasing an Air Stream Trailer for her home, learning all about its mechanisms, towing it with a suitable truck and starting her new journey across the US, depending utterly on the grace of God to guide her (at this point in her life her daughters are young adults making their way through college and work.) This meant transforming her previous life to that of a Tin Can Pilgrim … thus finding joy in everyday life and growing in her Christian Faith as a result. Her travelling companion is her dog Penny, a chihuahua, a silent faithful companion.

The subsequent chapters detail her adventure with a whole chapter given to the mechanical demands and know-how of maintaining the Airstream home! Along the way she delighted in the love of God and found ways to engage total strangers with her joy. She had to cope with a brush with cancer, and many other mishaps but she maintained her daily conversation and dependence on God recognising that her fundamental identity is as a child God.

At the start of her book she had this quote from St Brendan the navigator in the sixth century which struck a chord with her:

Help me to journey beyond the familiar

and into the unknown.

Give me the faith to leave old ways

and break fresh ground with You.

Christ of the mysteries, I trust You

to be stronger than each storm within me.

I will trust in the darkness and know

that my times, even now, are in Your hand,

Tune my spirit to the music of heaven,

and somehow, make my obedience count for You.

Lynda epitomises a comment made by Pope Francis at the start of the pandemic when he described the two meanings of “crisis” in the Chinese language as challenge/opportunity… she certainly lived both of those descriptions in her heroic courageous odyssey as she toured the US sharing the beauty of creation with all and sundry in her ordinary daily experiences. Her trust in God’s providence was phenomenal as she faced various crises, not least of them technical!!

This is an unusual and, quite often a very moving book on courage in the face of adversity, well peppered with good quotes and humour.