We live two blocks from our neighborhood park. The kids love to go there. It has a giant set of toys all connected together, including several slides and things to climb on. It has huge, grassy areas for the kids to run around on. It also has a small basketball court and a covered slab of concrete with two picnic tables. When the weather is right, the paletero often comes by pushing his freezer cart containing ice cream treats. All in all, the park is a great place to be.
It can take anywhere from one minute to thirty minutes to get to it, however, depending on our mode of transportation. When it’s too hot out during the summer months, I usually load the kids into the van for a ride to the park. That’s when the trip takes about one minute. When the weather’s more temperate, we often walk, or the kids take turns riding in our wagon. That’s when the trip takes thirty minutes.
If you’ve ever walked anywhere with a young child, you understand. You can’t just, well, walk there. You have to stop and look at every interesting thing along the way.
Between our house and the park, there are approximately one million fascinating things just begging to be more closely examined. Like…rocks. And that dog over there. And that puddle—wait! Don’t jump in it!—of dirty water.
I used to try to make our walk to the park efficient. After all, it was my job to teach the kids to do things promptly and without wasting time.
Fortunately, it wasn’t long before I came to realize that stopping to look at things, or just walking slowly, wasn’t a waste of time. In fact, it was the whole point.
I had thought that getting to the park was the point, so I wanted us to do business and get there. My children, however, had more wisdom than I did. They realized that the journey was as much part of the whole experience as being at the park was. In fact, they had a better time on our outings when they could experience life along the way, as opposed to when they had to pass life by so they could experience a smaller piece of it for a longer time.
I wonder how our lives would be different if we could learn to enjoy the journey instead of focusing on making it quickly and efficiently from one experience to another.
As moms, it’s easy for us to get so caught up in helping our child reach the next milestone or achieve the next goal that we forget to enjoy our child, and let him or her enjoy us, along the way. We’re so busy trying to keep the house clean that we can’t take time to cuddle our child as he crawls up into our lap. We become so focused on planning for the next vacation, or the upgrade to a bigger house, that we can’t enjoy what we have now.
Where does God fit into all this? He gets squeezed in on Sundays and sometimes Wednesdays. Maybe occasionally, we give a minute or two of prayer time.
What we fail to realize is that the journey with Him is part of the point. Had heaven been the only point, God could have taken us there the minute He saved us. But He has chosen to leave us on this world for awhile. Why? Because He knows that we need the journey. Walking with God here, now, on earth, is not merely a fringe benefit we get to enjoy on the way to heaven. It’s part of the goal.
Will my kids and I still make it to the park even if we don’t particularly enjoy the journey? Yes. Will you and I still make it to heaven even if we don’t particularly enjoy God along the way? Yes. But we’ll have missed the point.
We were made to enjoy God. We were made for a relationship with Him. And we don’t have to wait for heaven to experience that. We can love and be loved by Him now.
If we make it to heaven without having walked with God, we’re missing something.
And missing out on the journey with God matters a whole lot more than missing out on a journey to the park.
Oh, God, grant us a heart that deeply desires to walk with You along the way. Teach us how. Please, God, take us by the hand, so You and we can walk together.
Psalm 42:1—As the deer pants for streams of water, so my soul pants for you, O God.