It was GK Chesterton who famously said that a tourist sees what he has come to see but a traveler sees… what he sees.

This distinction is one of the key takeaways of my three months away from parish life and my beloved faith family at St. David’s. I am a quintessential tourist, having lists of things to accomplish, places to go, and people to meet. However when the first days of my sabbatical kicked in I found myself overcome by the repressed depression of some recent personal tragedies – and my to-do tourist list quickly went unattended – and lay on the counter for a very long time.

Most of us have experienced depression – dark nights of the soul – periods in which we were not ourselves. In its grips we are not only sad, but disheartened and lonely. If you’re like me you wonder where God is. And you wish, more than anything, for the clouds to pass.

However, I have come to discover that this is tourist behavior. Tourists are not interested in unpleasantness, they long for its end. They crave the destination. They speed to get to places. They long for arrival. They do not understand that God has much for us to see and learn not only in the pleasant, but in the unpleasant.

This is why it is better to be a traveler. Travelers are not in a hurry. Travelers live in the journey. Travelers know that they have already arrived. As a wise monk once said, ‘the goal is not to wash the dishes, but to be present in the washing of the dishes.’

In what ways are you a tourist? Or a traveler? How do you long to ‘get there’ - to speed your way out of the mundane, to finally ‘arrive?’ I think God calls us to live more authentically – more in line with the Creation we’ve been given and with the path that’s before us. In what ways might traveler behavior resonate with you? How might you savor the journey and not just the destination?