THE CELEBRATION OF NOTHING
He was hit by a car in Colorado, attacked by a crocodile in Australia, detained as a suspected spy in Egypt and survived illness and periods of despair.
His name is Jason Lewis, and on Saturday, October 6, 2007 this British adventurer finally came home, completing a 13-year, 46,000-mile human-powered circumnavigation of the globe. The 40-year-old carried his 26-foot yellow pedal craft the last few miles up the River Thames, pushing it across the Meridian Line at Greenwich, where his expedition began in 1994, according to the AP Press Release from London.
The press release went on to say that Mr. Lewis struggled for words as he described his feelings at the close of an odyssey that took him around the globe, power only by his arms and legs – on a bicycle, a pedal boat, a kayak and inline skates.
“I’m overwhelmed,” he told Sky News television after arriving. “It’s been my life, for 13 years I’ve put everything into this.”
The adventure, which was originally believed would take three and a half years, was met with a plethora of problems. After two years of planning and fundraising, Jason Lewis set out with fellow adventurer Steve Smith, who first dreamed up the idea of going around the globe using only human power in 1991. On the very first leg of their trip they became “horribly lost” while traveling to the English coastal town of Rye, where they had a pedal boat waiting.
The pair crossed the English Channel to France, cycled to Portugal, and then took shifts pedaling their boat across the Atlantic Ocean, reaching Miami in February 1995. On their trip across the Atlantic they survived close encounters with a shrimping trawler, a whale and a giant wave that swept Smith overboard.
Lewis and Smith spent 111 days cooped up in their broom closet-sized pedal boat, causing their relationship to deteriorate. They parted ways in Miami, where Lewis strapped on his inline skates for the 3,500-mile trip to San Francisco. In Pueblo, Colorado, Jason Lewis was hit by a car, causing him to suffer having both of his legs broken and costing him nine months for recuperation.
In San Francisco the two were reunited, and together they pedaled from the Golden Gate Bridge to Hawaii, where they split for good. Smith wrote a book titled “Pedaling to Hawaii,” while Lewis journeyed on to Australia.
He biked across the Australian outback, dodged supertankers in Singapore straits and hiked the Himalayas. From Mumbai, India, he pedaled his boat across the Indian Ocean to Djibouti and made his way north by bicycle through Sudan and Egypt.
Lewis was dogged by accidents and sickness during the trip; but local authorities were a problem, too. In Alabama, Mr. Lewis logged some “interesting experiences” with policemen. He cycled through Tibet at night in order to avoid detection by Chinese roadblocks; and when he crossed into Egypt from Sudan, Lewis was thrown in jail by the military on suspicion of being a spy.
Following his release from prison, he biked through the Sinai desert and across Jordan, Syria, and Turkey. He then powered through Europse over the summer, arriving in Greenwich, in southeast London, to cheers from family, supporters and the Duke of Gloucester, the expedition’s British patron.
As I read the account of Jason Lewis’ adventure, I could not help but be struck by how society seems to have fallen into the celebration of NOTHING.
This man completed a journey, but for what purpose? He has invented no medicinal cure for any ill, and, in fact, has invented nothing at all, much less something that could enhance our quality of life.
His trip took 13 years to complete, time in which he contributed absolutely NOTHING to society in relation to labor or service. He bore no message to world leaders, nor did he present a means by which one’s life could be forever changed for the better. Yet, he will be celebrated throughout the world simply because he traveled the globe.
If we are going to celebrate someone’s journey across the waters, why don’t we consider the Apostle Paul – his many “adventures” helped to spread the glorious gospel of Christ across the then known world.
Or, consider with me the idea of celebrating a man whose name we will likely never know, but without whom, Paul may not have been met with his Gospel-spreading success. That man’s contribution to the spreading of God’s Gospel was his talent in making ropes. Whoever this man was, it was his rope that was used to let Paul down a wall in a basket.
In this world that is so caught up in the celebration of nothing, I would like to take a moment and celebrate an unknown rope-maker who contributed to the spreading of the Gospel to the entire world.
