Arthur Blessitt was a man with a singularly audacious mission: to carry a large wooden cross on foot across city streets, country roads, continents, and ultimately, every country in the world. His journey spanned over four decades, covering more than 43,000 miles, and though his mission was spiritual and deeply personal, it transformed him into an unconventional global figure, part evangelist, part adventurer, and sometimes even an enigma. His life story reads like a blend of Forrest Gump’s unassuming yet extraordinary wanderlust and the unwavering conviction of a crusader. Blessitt passed away on January 14 at the age of 84, but his remarkable odyssey remains one of the most unconventional stories of devotion and perseverance in modern history.
It all began on Christmas Day in 1969. Arthur Blessitt, a Southern Baptist preacher who had been evangelizing on Hollywood’s Sunset Strip—amid the counterculture of hippies, freaks, and addicts—decided to embark on a literal and symbolic walk of faith. Armed with a handmade, larger-than-life wooden cross measuring 6-by-12 feet and weighing 110 pounds, Blessitt took his first steps from Los Angeles toward New York City. Though the physical weight of the cross was immense, the metaphorical burden he carried was even heavier: a divine mission, as he saw it, to bring the message of Jesus to the entire world.
It wasn’t long into his journey across the United States that Blessitt realized he needed to make some practical modifications. He traded his sandals for sturdy boots and eventually added a small wheel to the base of his cross to make the arduous trek more manageable. Later, he fashioned a lighter, 42-pound version of the cross that could be split in two, which was especially useful as he expanded his mission beyond the U.S. Still, the journey itself was grueling. It took him six months to walk across America, a feat that might’ve satisfied even the most committed pilgrim. But for Blessitt, this was just the beginning. As he recounts on his website, he felt he received a divine directive to “go all the way,” a global mandate that would become his life’s calling.
Blessitt’s first international expedition took him to Northern Ireland in 1971, and from there, his path became dizzyingly expansive. He traveled to Europe, Africa, the Middle East, East Asia, and beyond, always with his cross in tow. Along the way, he carried a cheerful arsenal of “Smile! Jesus Loves You” stickers, which he distributed to curious onlookers. Despite his genial approach, the journey was far from free of conflict. He was jeered at, harassed by police, and even had his cross stolen—ironically, in Assisi, Italy, the hometown of St. Francis. At other times, his physical safety was in palpable danger. He navigated war zones, disaster areas, and regions hostile to outsiders, narrowly escaping harm on multiple occasions. In Northern Ireland, he stood near a terrorist bomb as it exploded, and in Kenya, he found himself surrounded by angry baboons. Undaunted, he kept going.
There was an almost surreal quality to Blessitt’s journey; while his mission was simple—spreading a message of love and faith—the contexts and encounters he experienced were anything but. Over the decades, he found himself face-to-face with historical figures like Yasir Arafat, legendary preacher Billy Graham, and music icon Bob Dylan. Whether intentional or coincidental, his path crossed with globally significant moments and people, lending an almost mythic quality to his quest. Remarkably, he seemed untouched by the world’s chaos and complexities, doggedly maintaining that his effort was apolitical and inclusive. Still, misunderstandings were inevitable. In the U.S., Blessitt’s appearance—his flowing hair and sandals, reminiscent of Jesus Christ—sometimes led people to assume he was part of the Ku Klux Klan or an anti-abortion protester. Elsewhere, he was mistaken for a holy man, and even, on one occasion in Liberia, for Jesus himself. It was only the humility of his faith, combined with his sense of humor, that kept him grounded.
"Some people see me and shout, ‘You’re a nut!’” Blessitt joked in The Cross: The Arthur Blessitt Story, a 2009 documentary about his life. “I say, ‘That’s all right, at least I’m screwed on the right bolt.’”
His achievements were nothing short of historic. By 2008, after walking with his cross through decades of hardships and triumphs, Blessitt finally completed his goal of visiting every country on Earth. Even the notoriously closed-off North Korea allowed him a symbolic pilgrimage: officials permitted him to carry his cross from his hotel door to the street and back again. Each journey added a new story, not to mention more entries in his meticulously kept logs. He recorded everything, from the distance his boots could handle—about 500 miles—to the 24 times he was arrested while walking. All this earned him a Guinness World Record for the “longest ongoing pilgrimage.”
Blessitt’s early life gave few hints of the world-spanning mission he would one day undertake. Born Arthur Owen Blessitt in Greenville, Mississippi, on October 27, 1940, and raised on a cotton farm in rural Louisiana, his upbringing was unremarkable. He attended Mississippi College, a Christian institution, but left without earning a degree. Later, he attended Golden Gate Baptist Theological Seminary in California but dropped out before completing his studies. After a few years as an itinerant preacher in the Mountain West, Blessitt moved to Los Angeles in 1967, where he found himself immersed in the whirlwind of the 1960s counterculture.
Blessitt was uniquely equipped to evangelize in this environment. His style was a curious mix of traditional preaching and groovy hippie ethos. He frequented bars, clubs, and concert halls, dressing in long hair and sandals to blend in, and his sermons were peppered with metaphors drawn from the drug and rock ’n’ roll culture of the time. “If you want to get high, you don’t have to drop acid,” he wrote in one of his many spiritual tracts. “Just pray and you go all the way to Heaven.”
Though he was clearly a man of faith, Blessitt never turned himself into a rigid evangelical archetype. Instead, there was an almost childlike exuberance in his message—a sense that what he was doing was both profoundly serious and delightfully simple. It’s no wonder he became a minor celebrity over the years, with media outlets marveling at the sheer audacity of his mission. “You’d be amazed how much attention a man carrying a big wooden cross gets,” he once told People magazine.
Blessitt’s personal life, like his travels, was colorful. He married twice, first to Sherry Simmons in 1963 (they divorced in 1990) and then to Denise Brown that same year. He had seven children—six from his first marriage and one from his second—along with 12 grandchildren and a great-grandchild. When recounting his journey, Blessitt often credited moments of doubt to his unwavering faith. When a village leader in Liberia prostrated himself in awe of what he believed to be the physical manifestation of Jesus, Blessitt considered stopping his mission altogether. After all, he never wanted to portray himself as a religious leader. But he claimed Jesus reassured him: “Don’t worry about it. Just keep going down the road.”
Arthur Blessitt did just that—he kept going, down countless roads, across oceans and deserts, into danger zones and moments of grace, carrying his cross and his message of love despite misunderstanding, opposition, and hardship. Now, even as his journey ends, the legacy of his incredible feat endures, an invitation to all who hear it to consider what it means to take up one’s own cross and walk.
