My Dutch burglar

Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard said it’s not an adventure until something goes wrong. Adventure for me began on a drizzly Saturday night in downtown Amsterdam when a burglar made off with my bag.

I was seated in a coffee shop, working over my laptop and drinking coffee with my youngest daughter, newly graduated from college and joining her mom for a brief reporting trip. It was a brightly lit place, daylight in northern Europe lasting until after 9 p.m. in spring. I was too absorbed in what I was doing, and a thief came in, coat over his arm, bent down as if to pick something up, and, without my sensing what was happening right at my feet, swept up and out with my possessions, including needed cash and my passport.

You can plan for the contingencies of overseas travel, the “what to do ifs …,” and still be thoroughly surprised and rattled when one of them happens. I spent several minutes in disbelief. I actually asked the barista if someone had turned in a bag. The shop owner let us watch the security camera footage with him, where we saw the whole thing unfold. The owner drew a map to the police station, and later caught up with us to see if we were all right.

“It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there’s no knowing where you might be swept off to,” said Bilbo in Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings.

Thinking you’re ready for adventure and being ready for the adventure that shows up are different things. In the blue-green late-night light of a police station in dark Amsterdam, I had to face for myself what I write and teach about. First, I’d written last in this space about loving enemies. My daughter and I sat down on a bench and prayed for the burglar. I wouldn’t have done that apart from writing about it (and getting mail from some of you that day).

I often tell journalism students about the prerequisites for being an overseas reporter, or a reporter anywhere. In fact, my schedule included spending an hour with World Journalism Institute students via Skype the week the theft happened. Job qualifications aren’t having the right degree or language fluency, I tell them. They are more about how willing you are to step out on a limb; to ask stupid questions, stumble through language barriers and into new subject areas; to generally feel out of your comfort zone yet somehow find your purpose there.

The global village fools us into thinking we have, even in a foreign country, more control than we do.

And there I was, trying to figure out what to do with a police report issued in Dutch, a closed U.S. Embassy, and a schedule that had us leaving the country early the next morning. My daughter was on the phone with my bank, canceling a card, but the young officer helped us come up with a plan forward.

Striking into uncharted territory used to be the American way. In one journal entry, Meriwether Lewis reports stumbling on “a plum forrest” of 9 square miles, discovering prairie dogs, then spotting 3,000 buffalo—all before 8 a.m. Now we are a country more of planners than adventurers.

With an adventure, we are more alive to all our senses, aware of new details about our surroundings, and thrust into depending on others, plus depending on God to help us be wise depending on others.

All those things happened on our little Dutch adventure. The streets of Amsterdam became more important to navigate and read well. Our reliance on strangers grew: from the coffee shop owner to the police officer to the hotel owner who stayed up late to let us back in, and more as the week progressed.

The global village—with its ubiquitous cell phone service, Wi-Fi, and American chain stores—fools us into thinking we have, even in a foreign country, more control than we do. Yet at home or abroad, change and uncertainty are actually the things we can count on. A stolen bag is a small loss, but a reminder of this uncertain world and its fleeting possessions, and of more and better adventures ahead.