Okay, I didn’t really scream it, but I felt it. 

After the Badlands, I stopped at a billboard-advertised wild-west shopping mall where I tried on fringed suede jackets and turquoise earrings.  Then I drove through the majestic pines of the Black Hills and gawked appropriately at the faces of Mount Rushmore.  I sped past the undulating grasses of the golden plains, breathed the air of open spaces and felt giddy with a sense of independence I hadn’t felt for decades. 

I hadn’t realized how desperately I needed to get out from under my husband’s long shadow.   After nearly two decades of being “Bill Hybels’ wife,” suddenly I was just me.  I chatted with people in roadside diners and small town coffee shops who didn’t care a whit who my husband was or what hats I wore in real life.  To them I was just a crazy woman from Chicago who was heading—alone—to a horse ranch in Montana for no other reason than that she wanted to. 

I wanted to.   It had been so long since I had done anything just because I wanted to.  So long since I had made an independent choice.  Each morning I looked at my map and chose a particular route because I wanted to.  Each evening I selected a particular motel from a group of equally shabby options because I wanted to.  This sudden freedom to say I want and to live according to it was exhilarating. 

One notion I’d carried for years was that women in ministry should never offend anybody.  Consequently, for years I had done my best to walk, talk, dress, smile, serve, spend my money, choose my friends, cut my hair—you name it, it was on my list—in such a way that I would displease no one.  Now suddenly none of it mattered.

Nobody at the Motel 6 cared if I wore the same dirty jeans for five days in a row.  Nobody at the truck stop where I stopped for a cup of coffee cared whether or not I had a cheery smile on my face.   Nobody wondered why I talked to this person but didn’t talk to that person.   For a brief window of time, I was free of the burden of people-pleasing.

I followed the empty expressway into Montana and bought cowboy boots in Bozeman. I headed north into White Sulfur Springs, then asked the locals for directions to the ranch.  Twenty minutes later, as I twisted up the long gravel drive to my assigned cabin, I could barely believe I was really there, on my own, with a whole week stretching out before me.

Every morning I ambled along the river that cut like a diamond snake through the center of the ranch, then hiked through the pastures of high grass and over the hills golden with aspens.  Every afternoon I rode horses with the rancher’s wife.  In the evening I sat in front of the fireplace in my log cabin and wrote letters to Todd and Shauna on stationary covered with the haunting faces of she-wolves. I described the badger that stood on hind legs and hissed at me in the meadow, the cowboy who recited poetry by a campfire in the hills, the dinner of roasted corn and charbroiled steaks I shared with other city slicker guests like me. 

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