When we met at the beginning of March, there were no more than a handful of people interested in spending a few days together. For John, Marc, Giusy and Marco, only one thing was clear: the desire to be together and live an experience of communion, regardless of the number of people. Unexpectedly, a group of more than forty adults and children met for the annual Southeast vacation in Lake Junaluska, North Carolina, for a long weekend in early June. What brought together families from Ohio, North and South Carolina, Georgia and Alabama?

One friend left at four in the morning just to spend a day and a half with us. Lucia, who travelled with her family from Columbus, Ohio, summarized it in the final assembly: “I am here because this is a place where my heart can find what it is looking for and be fulfilled.” Her husband Didi added, “Being moved by the beauty of [more than twenty!] kids singing together, and by the Mass celebrated on the mountain summit...all of this is a sign of Mercy overwhelmingly beyond my expectations.”

The theme of the vacation was “Expect a journey, not a miracle”—and what a journey we had! A journey in which the experience of the Christian refugees in Jordan proposed to us what was essential: looking to Christ as the only possibility to live with peace and a seemingly impossible joy in every circumstance.

As Michele noted, the beginning was simple for many of us. “I had only to say ‘yes.’ God gives me what I need and moves the whole world for me. I did not realize it until now.” Dante’s personal journey, briefly introduced one evening, provoked in many the desire to live at the level of their real desires, a journey of real awareness of our destiny (the “stars” that close every Canto).

“Everything was surprisingly beautiful,” Michele continued, “the sign of a concrete Presence working through us, bigger than what we could plan or construct with our energies. Such as the unexpected meeting with three college students who joined us for Mass during the hike, or the old couple who thanked us for the ‘concert’ that followed lunch on top of the mountain.”

“A journey can always be at the beginning and never start,” Anna acutely observed. “I want to walk now, a decision to go deeper awakened by the experience of a Presence so clearly at work in our companionship.” She was not the only one. Marc said, “I have to answer, to embrace the proposal and make the journey.”

We left with the desire to communicate to others what happened. “We usually pick and choose who to stay with or who to tell certain things to,” Alessandra concluded at the final assembly. “Now I realize that we have to propose to everybody what we have seen.” In the end, an unexpected miracle.