A couple of years ago I remember hearing about some guys who made the trek from South Africa to Egypt by motorcycle and had completed their journey through that rather tumultuous continent when a suicide bomber blew himself up in Cairo, thereby killing, among others, one of the four guys who made the journey. Read about the attack here.

While perusing books at Barnes and Noble earlier this week I came across one that, as it happens, was written by Erik Mirandette, the brother of the rider killed, who was also seriously injured in the attack. The book is titled The Only Road North: 9000 Miles of Dirt and Dreams. In further evidence that Google is taking over the world, GoogleBooks has a scan of the complete book here.

The thing that most stood out to me was actually at the very end, where Mirandette says that had he known beforehand how all of this would have turned out, he never would have done any of it: “I would have without a second thought or hesitation thrown my destiny right out the window and preserved the comfortable life that I was so lucky to have. But I wasn’t given that choice. My choice was to either follow and believe, or not. I understood the risk; there were never any guarantees” (p. 296).

This brings to mind something my favorite writer Frederick Buechner once said: “It is one of life’s greatest mercies that it is not given to us to know the might-have-been of things.”

Because let’s be honest: we all want the easy road. If we are told that making a certain decision will result in a significant amount of suffering - emotional, spiritual, physical, whatever - we will make some other decision. We will, as Mirandette says, minimize the risks and throw away whatever it is that is to be gained by walking the difficult path laid out for us. And that is the real tragedy.

Losing your life isn’t the worst tragedy, after all. Wasting it is.