Three Wooden Crosses and the Roads We Carry

Every now and then, a song refuses to remain just a song.

It follows you into quiet moments. It appears unexpectedly during a long drive. It lingers long after the music has ended, quietly asking questions you weren't prepared to answer.

For me, that song is the Three Wooden Crosses  by Randy Travis.

On the surface, it tells the story of four strangers travelling together, each carrying different dreams, burdens, and expectations. By the final verse, you realize it was never really about the journey itself. It is about legacy, about purpose, and about the quiet ways ordinary lives can shape the future of people they may never even meet.

Every time I hear it, my mind drifts back to a drive I once shared with a colleague who was close friend.

We were travelling from Nanyuki to Rumuruti to scout a livestock market. I was looking to add a few animals to my flock, and he had agreed to come along.

Anyone who has travelled that road knows there is something almost therapeutic about it.

The plains of Laikipia stretch endlessly toward the horizon. Acacia trees stand patiently against the sky, and every now and then a herd of cattle or wildlife reminds you that this part of Kenya still moves at its own pace. There are long stretches where silence feels more appropriate than conversation.

That was one of those journeys.

For much of the drive, we simply watched the landscape unfold before us.

Neither of us seemed in a hurry to fill the silence.

As the kilometres slipped by, I found myself stealing the occasional glance at my companion.

We were looking through the same windscreen.

Watching the same plains.

Passing the same hills.

Breathing the same air.

Yet I could not shake the feeling that we were travelling through two completely different worlds.

I was in my mid-fifties.

He was barely into his thirties.

The contrast between us could hardly have been greater.

By then, I had travelled across five continents, missing only Australia. I had accumulated experiences that only time can give—successes I was grateful for, failures I would never wish to repeat, friendships that had endured, and lessons that had often arrived disguised as disappointments.

Financially, I had also been blessed. My bank account had comfortably crossed into seven figures.

As I looked across at him, I found myself wondering whether he even had a bank account.

But the longer I sat with that thought, the more I realized I was asking the wrong question.

Because what struck me most had nothing to do with money.

He was full of life.

Full of possibility.

Full of hope.

He spoke about tomorrow with the quiet confidence that only youth seems able to possess. His future stretched before him like the open plains outside our windows—wide, inviting, and seemingly without limits.

Meanwhile, despite everything I had seen, achieved, and accumulated, I found myself carrying something very different.

Despair.

Not the dramatic kind that announces itself loudly.

The quieter kind.

The kind that settles gently into your thinking after enough disappointments, enough setbacks, enough victories that somehow failed to satisfy in the way you expected they would.

Somewhere along the road, I had collected destinations but misplaced my optimism.

That realization was uncomfortable.

We spend much of our lives believing that experience naturally produces wisdom, that travel broadens the soul, and that financial success eventually brings peace.

Sometimes it does.

But sometimes experience also introduces disappointment.

Travel reveals how much remains beyond our understanding.

And money, useful as it is, cannot purchase contentment.

It can certainly make life more comfortable.

But comfort and peace have never been identical twins.

As we continued towards Rumuruti, another thought quietly emerged.

Perhaps we were not merely driving across Laikipia.

Perhaps we were travelling through two entirely different realities while sharing the same vehicle.

The landscape outside was identical.

The landscapes within us were not.

The older I become, the more I suspect that this is true of all of us.

We sit beside one another in meetings.

We worship in the same churches.

We attend the same weddings and funerals.

We share meals.

We laugh at the same stories.

We look out of the same windows.

Yet every one of us is carrying a different world.

One person is quietly celebrating.

Another is silently grieving.

One is beginning to dream.

Another is wondering whether they still have the strength to dream again.

Perhaps that is why we should be slower to judge one another.

We rarely know what road another person is travelling, even when they are sitting right beside us.

Looking back now, I cannot help but smile.

It was, in many ways, a tragic comedy.

The younger man, who possessed fewer experiences and fewer material possessions, seemed infinitely wealthier in hope.

The older man, with the fuller passport and the healthier bank account, found himself quietly envying a treasure that cannot be deposited in any bank.

The ability to believe that tomorrow will be better than today.

I still think about that journey.

Not because of the livestock market.

Not because of the road.

But because it reminded me that wealth wears many disguises.

Some of them fit neatly into financial statements.

Others reveal themselves only in the way a person speaks about the future.

Whenever I hear Three Wooden Crosses now, I no longer think only about the four travellers in Randy Travis's song.

I also think about two men driving through Laikipia, each carrying a different story, each looking through the same windscreen, and each measuring life with a completely different ruler.

Perhaps that is what the song was trying to tell us all along.

The roads we travel matter.

The places we reach matter.

But in the end, they are not what define us.

What defines us is the hope we carry, the courage we preserve when life disappoints us, and the quiet gifts we leave behind in the lives of those who travel beside us.

Because perhaps the richest person on any journey is not the one who has seen the most of the world.

Perhaps it is the one who still believes there is something beautiful waiting around the next bend.

Life rarely measures us by the miles we have travelled. More often, it is measured by the hope we carried along the way.