Our Airstream on Mount Hood

I stood on Mount Hood with the Airstream behind me and asked for direction. The answer came through Angelina’s nudge: build a salt cave in Hood River. That was the call—clear, specific, and impossible on paper. No money. No location. A liberal town that didn’t know us. Yet the invitation was unmistakable.

Makers recognize this moment. The project, the book, the space, the ministry arrives not as a good idea but as a weight that refuses to lift. The temptation is to treat it like one more item on the list. It isn’t. It is the moment the ordinary world cracks open and the Special World begins to insist.

We ran. Four prior attempts at the Airstream had already taught us how expeditions usually go, yet this one felt different—until it didn’t. Before the election, with repossession breathing down our necks, we fled to Kansas and hid for three months. We told ourselves we were being strategic. We were actually refusing the call.

Every maker who has ever packed the truck knows the internal script: “Once the timing is better… once we have the money… once the market settles.” The wilderness is not punishment. It is the space the refusal creates. The longer we stay there, the more the call distorts into something we can control.

We returned after the election. The only commercial space in downtown Hood River finally answered. Three months deferred rent if we cleaned it ourselves. We moved in January 19, 2025 and began turning raw space into salt cave.

The refusal stage had followed the pattern of Moses and Jonah. But once surrendered, the ancient pattern for the actual work is the one given to Bezalel: “I have filled him with the Spirit of God, with wisdom, with understanding, with knowledge and with all kinds of skills.” The builder is never the one who supplies the vision or the resources. He is the one who shows up with the skills already given and begins the work that was commanded. The salt cave was never our project. It was the Tabernacle we were told to raise in our Nineveh.

The cave was finished on Good Friday. Easter anointing followed. That sequence was not coincidence. It marked the descent—the moment the reward stops being a private possession and becomes something that must be carried back.

Makers often stop here. They treat the finished work as the end. The monomyth is clear: the elixir is not the cave itself. The elixir is the lived knowledge that the same pattern will repeat. The sage doesn’t just create; he connects the dots so the next man doesn’t have to wander the wilderness alone.

The repetitive Exodus pattern—call, resistance, wilderness, provision, building—has now shown up across multiple episodes in my life. The Airstream, the FIAT 500 on the Italian pass, the salt cave, the next thing I cannot yet name. Each time the refusal looks rational. Each time the provision arrives after the refusal is surrendered.

For the man at the center of this archetype, the question is no longer whether the call will come. It already has. The question is whether you will recognize the wilderness you are currently choosing and walk out of it toward the work you were already equipped to do.

The mountain is real. The climbers are coming. The sanctuary still needs builders.

The question is whether you will recognize the wilderness you are currently choosing and walk out of it toward the work you were already equipped to do.

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