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The locker room an hour after the season ends is one of the loneliest rooms in sport. A veteran learns his contract will not be renewed, a rookie sits with the injury that just rewrote her career, a coach absorbs a firing the press release will announce in the morning. Athletic directors, club execu...
The Parish Rolls In at Midnight
Most ministry settings hold still long enough to learn the names. A travel center does not. A driver fuels, showers, sleeps a federally mandated ten hours, and is gone by dawn, three states away before you finish your next shift. The parish of a trucking chaplain arri...
A driver eases seventy-eight feet of truck and trailer into the last open slot on the back row of a travel center at 9 p.m. He is 1,400 miles from home, eleven days into a two-week run, and federal rules say he cannot move again for ten hours. Around him idle three hundred trucks, each cab holding o...
Long-haul trucking moves nearly everything the rest of the country touches, and it asks a steep price from the people who drive it: weeks away from home, meals eaten alone, and hard news that arrives while you are four states from anyone who knows your name. At travel centers and truck stops across ...
It is 11:40 on a Tuesday night at a travel center off the interstate. Eighty trucks idle in the rows, and in one of them sits a driver three weeks from home, phone in hand, reading a message he does not know how to answer. Out in the lot, a trucking chaplain walks the rows with a thermos and time to...
The travel center parking lot behind your fuel islands is a small overnight town. Seventy or eighty trucks idle in the dark, and in each cab is a driver who has been away from home for weeks: one worrying over a marriage strained by the miles, one grieving a parent he could not get home to bury, one...
The Parish Arrives by Sea
Most chaplaincy settings let you build trust over months. A ship gives you hours. A vessel ties up, a crew of twenty steps ashore after weeks at sea, and by tomorrow night the berth is empty again. The engineer who has not seen his daughter in nine months, the deck cadet on...
A container ship ties up for eighteen hours, works cargo around the clock, and sails. Aboard are twenty crew members who may not have stepped on land in weeks, who are months into a nine-month contract, and who carry family news, good and bad, that arrived over a patchy connection somewhere at sea. ...
Most of the world's goods arrive by ship, carried by crews who spend months at a time away from everyone they love. If you are a seafarer, or you love one, you know the particular weight of that distance: birthdays missed, bad news arriving over a patchy connection, and a contract that does not end ...
A container ship ties up at 06:00 and sails again before midnight. In those eighteen hours, a crew of twenty-two, most of them nine months from home, has one chance to reach a store, a phone signal, and a friendly face. On the dock stands a port chaplain with a van, a pocket full of SIM cards, and t...
A working port never really stops: container ships on tight turnarounds, longshoremen on rotating shifts, and crews from around the world who may be thousands of miles from home for months at a time. Somewhere on your waterfront right now is a seafarer who has not spoken to family in weeks, a dockwo...
The Terminal Is a Parish That Never Sits Still
Most chaplaincy settings hold people in place: a hospital bed, a cell block, a fire station. An airport holds no one. Thousands of people move through it every hour, each carrying a story you will meet exactly once. The soldier flying home for a funeral...
