The other day my wife and I were taking our little girl for a walk up to our local dairy. We were going there to treat her to an iceblock. She’s two and a half years old so everything is still a big deal for her. I came to a realization that is probably self apparent to most parents, but was an epiphany for me.
I found myself getting impatient along the walk, the journey to the dairy. In my mind the point of the journey was simple - get to the dairy, get the iceblock and come back home. In her mind the journey was very different. In her mind, the journey was a treasure trove of adventure and wonder. She stopped to pick up seeds with the excited exclamation of “look mum!” as she held up her newly found trophies for her mother to see. She sat on the grass, running the blades between her fingers. She pointed at cars as they drove past. She stopped to smell flowers and would not move on until her mother had done the same, smelling each flower in a bunch randomly growing by someone’s fence. She saw a man standing down a driveway and stopped to look, exclaiming “look, a man!” She took time to pat cats, stop and stare at people with their dogs as they walked past and stopped to find where the birds were when she heard them whistling their gleeful daytime songs. As we walked past the various shops in the same block that contains the dairy, she wanted to stop and look at the pictures in the windows, touch the fresh fruit and veg outside the grocers and any number of things that captured her wondrous imagination.
For her the journey was everything and the destination was simply something to enjoy at the end of it as she sat in the buggy on the way home savouring her iceblock, totally fixated on it as we walked her home.
At the beginning of the walk I sadly found myself falling into the bad habit of being impatient, but as I watched her utterly enjoying herself, amazed at her surroundings as we walked, she drove deep into me a lesson I have often given lip-service to – the value of the journey. Destinations are important – they are the rewards we get to savour at the end of the journey, but let’s not lose sight of the wonder of the walk, let’s take time to savour the journey and the lessons along the way. Sometimes those lessons will fill us with awe, other times they may be painful, but all the time they are worth dwelling in for a moment as we take them in and grow with them.
My daughter’s name is quite pertinent to this discussion. Her name is Selah. It’s taken from the Hebrew scriptures and appears predominantly in the Psalms as a musical instruction to pause and reflect about what has just been conveyed. She was doing exactly that along her journey.
Allow lent to not just be a destination of transformation at the end of it, but a journey of change along the way where we take time to pause and reflect on the moments along the way.
May God open our eyes to the wonder of the journey. May we savour and grow in each moment. May we learn to stop and open our eyes to the world around us and may the amazement of the journey capture our imagination just as a simple walk to the dairy captures the imagination of my little girl. My we be as little children, taking a walk with our heavenly Father and may he find delight in our wonder.
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