Travelling With God
If the first movement of travel is outward, the second can be inward.
Travelling inward isn’t meant as a rejection of the world but rather a reorientation of how it is encountered.
The problem has never been the road, the landscape or the distant horizon in front of us. The problem has always been inside ourselves and the quiet hope we attach to the thinking of the solution can be found outside elsewhere. That the outside could somehow carry what only God can sustain.
The call to inside is not a call to stop travelling outside. Travelling is an important part of who we are, what makes us human. It is a call rather to look at it differently so we might travel differently.
It is the recognition that what draws us toward a new place, toward a new situation is often a much deeper instinctual desire to be opened,, to be seen, to be heard, to be met, to be changed.
Travel, at its best, can only hint at this.
You arrive somewhere unfamiliar and for a moment, your usual patterns loosen. You notice more. You receive more. You feel more available to life. In that availability, something in you softens. Something inside you becomes more.
But what if that softening, what if that becoming more was not caused by a place or caused by a thing or an experience ?
What if that place revealed a capacity that was already within you but had seldom been accessed directly? And what if that capacity is most fully awakened not by distance, but instead by presence?
Traveling with God in this instance isn’t to say we stay still physically. It is instead to stop outsourcing aliveness and start deriving it directly.
It is to begin noticing that the same openness you feel in a new location can also begin to appear in an ordinary room, on an ordinary street, in a familiar life. It can be anywhere, found everywhere.
Because the promise is not that God will replace the world, but that He meets you within it in any place you choose to be.
The landscape does not need to become more extraordinary for it to become more, feel more, more awake, more inhabited.
There is a shift here, subtle but still a shift.
Instead of pushing outward asking “What is over there that I am missing ?”
You begin to look more inward, more closely to look and ask “Who is this in here with me ?”
That is a question that can change a lot of things, it can change the nature of movement itself.
You can still board a plane. Still walk through unfamiliar streets. Still stand before mountains, oceans, cities and beaches.
But you are now not trying to extract something from them, you are now receiving something from them, with Someone.
And this removes a pressure you may not have realised you were carrying, the pressure to feel something. The pressure to make the trip meaningful. The pressure to justify the movement, the cost and the stress.
Because meaning is now no longer dependent on the intensity of the experience.
It is held in the relationship you carry into it.
This also changes what happens when the feeling fades.
Because it will.
Even the most beautiful moment cannot sustain itself indefinitely.
But if you are travelling with God, the fading of the moment is not the end of aliveness.
It just becomes a transition within it.
You are still met. Still seen. Still held.
Not by the moment but the beauty held within it.
And something else begins.
You realise that the “inner world” you avoided by moving outward is not the painful emptiness you once thought it to be. Instead you find a beauty with each peak being bigger brighter and more beautiful than the one before.
Not a confined space this time, but a vast landscape of its own.
There are places within you you have not visited. Silences you have not sat with. Questions you have not allowed to surface. A depth that cannot be reached through motion alone. He is present in that depth.
And there’s no necessity for God to meet you at the edge of the world, he can meet you anywhere. The sofa in your home, the bus to work or a walk in the park.
If you need far away places that is not a problem for God, He will meet you anywhere. Just remember to also remain present within the internal one.
Not analysing it endlessly. Not fixing it. Just looking straight out into it.
Allowing it to be met.
This is a different kind of stability.
Not the stability of staying in one place, but the stability of knowing you are always accompanied, always held.
You are then less dependent on circumstances like time, money and opportunity to align.
Less dependent on novelty.
Less driven by the sense that life is happening somewhere else.
Less driven to controlling and forcing things to unfold to your will, instead of letting them unfold at their pace, their will.
Because wherever you go, you are never arriving empty or alone.
You are arriving with God.
And from that place, travel is restored to something more natural, more simple.
It becomes expression rather than escape. A way of participating in the world that is much deeper, much more connected and fulfilled.
You are still curious. You can still be drawn to new places. You can still be moved by beauty and difference. But by applying these equally to the inner world as well the urgency will start to fall away, the need will start to dissolve.
Perhaps this is what it means to “make your home in God.”
Not that you withdraw from the world, but that you are no longer homeless within it.
Instead of trying to find a place you can visit for a short time you can now pick up and carry everywhere a place that you can make your home for as long as you want, wherever you are. That place does not fade, its presence does not normalise. This is the way of being met independent of geography.
And so you can now travel freely. Not to find what is missing, but to share in and delight in what is already there.
Not searching for a new location that will finally hold you, but discovering you are already held exactly where you are.
From halfway round the world to mountains to valleys to beaches and new cities to picking up a pint of milk in your local convenience store. Traveling with God you will start to discover they are all the same place.
They are all at the heart of God.