About
Shawn Small
As Shawn sat in the front row of the small town Wisconsin theater in 1981, he had no idea that his whole life’s journey was about to come in to focus. Sneaking out of his house that evening to catch the final showing of Raiders of the Lost Ark, Shawn wondered what had drawn him almost magnetically to the movie. As the first few minutes of the film unfolded, Indiana Jones and his endless adventures enraptured Shawn. Suddenly the struggles and pains of Shawn’s childhood seemed insignificant compared to the quests the world offered. As Shawn lay in bed later that night, his mind aflame with imagination, he made a promise to himself: when he grew up, he would travel the world, explore the abundance of life’s mysteries and take any others along who were willing to join the journey.
Through his teenage years, Shawn’s voyages remained fantasy. The books he voraciously read contained all of his travel. But his need to discover the unknown continued to expand. Truth was out there and he had to find it. Throughout high school, he studied and read a plethora of material on religious thought while remaining a skeptic. But at the age of seventeen, while visiting a small church in northern New Jersey, Shawn experienced God tugging at his heart. In Jesus Christ, Shawn realized that Truth discovered him. This revelation began to bring the deep and hidden desires of his heart to pass. Shawn began his lifelong pilgrimage.
By 1990, Shawn was married to Cheryl, became a father to his first of three children and he was hired on as a student minister at a mega-church in Dallas. But years of tragedy were on the horizon. Three deadly car collisions and an imploding church defined his early twenties. Another five-year stint at a small but extremely unhealthy church left Shawn reeling from both emotional and spiritual trauma. After ten years of parish ministry, Shawn took a year sabbatical to try to discover what he wanted to do when he grew up. At age 23, Shawn finally took his first out-of-the-country trip where he explored ancient ruins, ate scrumptious seafood on the Mediterranean, sipped tea with desert Bedouins, and visited the catacombs beneath the sprawling city of Rome. By the end of his journey, wanderlust had become a permanent medical condition. By the age of 25, Shawn was leading groups of young people to indigenous tribes in the Guatemalan mountains, hiking through Alaskan rainforests to hidden glacier lakes, and entering ancient Celtic passage tombs in Ireland.
During all of 1999 Shawn pondered where in his life he experienced God’s pleasure in abundance. His greatest seasons of transformation and lifelong memories happened while leading pilgrimages of discovery around the globe. In 2000, Shawn unveiled Wonder Voyage Missions, a unique non-profit organization dedicated to leading seekers into the ancient and sacred sacrament of pilgrimage. A small group of people started to lead great adventures into foreign cultures where they encountered the face of God through the eyes of strangers. Since then, Wonder Voyage has led thousands of pilgrims to over forty countries and continues to expand into new territories. Shawn is also the founder of Boundless Expeditions, a travel company with a different set of ideas. Focusing on schools, colleges, corporations or lone travelers, BE is the future for those who look at adventure travel as a chance to change the world.
Although he continues to lead several trips and retreats a year, Shawn considers himself first and foremost a storyteller. During his extensive travels to over 50 countries on six continents, Shawn began to collect stories from diverse cultures he visited. His next pursuit was moving various tales to the written page. In 2008, Providence House Publishers released his first book, The Via Crucis, which won the bronze medal in the Inspirational/Spiritual category at the thirteenth annual Independent Publisher Book Awards. His second book in the series, The Via Advent, was released in 2010 and several more are in the works. Other storytelling works, such as the Sudanese documentary film RU are due in 2011.
Shawn currently lives in Flower Mound, Texas with his vivacious wife and travel savvy children. Wanderlust seems to have infected all of the Smalls.
