I am a traveler. Moving from one place to another has always been a significant part of my identity. Traveling is in my blood. As refugees, my grandparents traveled from a war-torn country to an island where they raised a family. As a baby, my mother traveled from the house she was born in, to the family she became a part of. As a child, my father traveled to the school where he learned, the prison where my grandfather worked, the hospital where my grandmother stayed, and to the home where he dreamed. As adults, my parents traveled to each other. As lovers, they traveled together. As adventurers, they traveled across the ocean to this country, giving me the opportunity to travel further and deeper than anyone else in generations within my family.
So far, I’ve definitely taken advantage of that opportunity. In eighteen years, I moved four times and switched schools a total of seven times. When I stayed at the same school, I moved to a new home, so I never stayed in the same place for more than two years. Every summer in college, I seized the chance to go overseas for missions, and for the past year, I’ve been on a mission traveling to eleven different countries in eleven months.
As much as I’ve traveled in my life, I don’t actually enjoy traveling all that much as far as the actual process of moving from place to place. What I do love is getting to a new place and interacting with its people. Traveling has brought me closer to places and people than I would have ever dreamed of; places that are new and different in climate and geography, that possess people of other languages, cultures, food, features, and more. If you’ve read my previous blog, you’ll know what some of these differences are.
I love how traveling has brought me closer to people in understanding these points of separation, but it has also led me to a greater appreciation of the unity in humanity. There are differences in just about everything, but at the same time, nothing; because at the end of the day, there is an end of the day no matter where you are. The sun rises and the sun sets. The climate and geography may not be the same, but we’re all spinning on the same earth past the same sun. No matter what language you speak, words have power to wound and to heal. Regardless of what your cultural history may be, there is always bloodshed with those who are oppressors and those who are being oppressed. No matter what you eat, pleasure can come from food as well as the pangs of hunger, and regardless of what you look like, you will run through youth into senescence, and die somewhere in that process.
I guess we’re all travelers, and even when we’re traveling millions of miles and thousands of years apart, we’re still traveling together – going to different places while being in the same place. In all this, I’m led to ponder the traveling I’ve done, the journeys I’ve made, and all I really end up with are questions. Where have I been? Where am I going? Why do I keep walking? Is there anyone who can go with me? I think back to the most important journey I’ve made that took place five years ago. This particular journey led me to a throne, and when I gaze at the one who sits upon it, I see that I don’t have all the answers – just this overwhelming feeling of peace. Traveling there has made all other journeys in my life have true meaning, because it is in Jesus, the one who sits on the throne, that I first received the guarantee that every place I’ve been has served a purpose within a grander scheme. Repeatedly, I grow in the assurance that the horizon of that grander scheme is where I am going, and the hope of its existence is enough to keep me going. I keep walking because He promises that I will never return empty-handed from my travels, and it is in Him that I’ve also received a traveling companion for life into eternity.
Of course, I was only able to travel and approach that throne as a result of the traveling that Jesus did first. Two thousand years ago, Jesus made the most important journey ever made in human history; that of God traveling to man. There is a praise song in which we sing:
He came from heaven to earth to show the way
From the earth to the cross, my debt to pay
From the cross to the grave
From the grave to the sky
Lord I lift your name up high.
Yes, because of where He has traveled, we lift His name on high. So finally, I'm thankful. I'm thankful that I get to travel with a God who has loved traveling with His people, whether it’s through a garden, a desert, a sea, a river, a mountain, or a lifetime.
“Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.”
Philippians 2:5-11
