The last few months have seen us out playing every weekend – singing songs from our new record. Almost everyone has jobs, ours just involves some travel. When the schedule looks like this you’d think we’d be tired of seeing new things, experiencing new places. Tired of goodbyes and airports and taxi’s and parking lots and people we’ve never met before holding signs with our names on them. But I still love it. I’m tired but i still love the journey. I think of the verse from Psalm 84
5 Blessed are those whose strength is in you,
whose hearts are set on pilgrimage.
There is a sacramental quality to travel. Leaving behind what you know and love and embracing what you have never seen before. Abraham had to do it in obedience to the call of God. Joseph was forced to do it. Moses and Israel had to go. Christ disciples are instructed to go into all the world in an act simply follows the Master, who himself left the halls of heaven and went to a far country…. Blessed are those whose hearts are set on pilgrimage…
I think of all the hours i’ve spent lying ill in bed wondering if I’ll ever get to ‘go’ anywhere again. Wondering during the hot, quiet hours of mid afternoon what the rest of the world is doing. I remember sitting in countless class rooms wondering how far from school i could get in the space of one class period before they’d find me. I remember sitting outside libraries watching planes take off and land and wishing I could be on them. I remember waking up early for a job on Monday wishing that my journey that day would take me somewhere I’d never been before in this great wide world.
I didn’t receive any inheritance from my grandfathers. But i think i did get given this gypsy heart to travel. My mothers father left Ireland for Africa on a mission that never took him back home to live. And my father’s father left Scotland to see where his feet would take him in this great wide world.
Every day I’m alive I will have a heart to go somewhere…And today I’m blessed with just enough strength to do it.
May God’s strength be your portion on whatever journey you are taking today
b
