It’s the journey that counts, not the destination. Growing up, my father used to say to us kids when we were traveling, “Look out the window. Pay attention to everything you see. Don’t be so eager to get to your destination that you can’t relish the beauty all around you.”

As our annual Lenten journey begins this week on Ash Wednesday, I decided to prepare my heart, mind, and spirit by reading Jane Leach’s book, Walking the Story; In the Steps of Saints and Pilgrims. Dr. Leach is a British pastor and theologian who is Principal of Wesley House, a Methodist theological college in Cambridge, England. She also introduced leaders in the Iowa Annual Conference to the practice of reflective supervision last year.

Walking the Story is a theological recounting of Leach’s 2005 pilgrimage on the five-hundred-mile El Camino pilgrimage trail from Pied-de-Port in southern France, across the Pyrenees, and stretching across northern Spain to Santiago de Compostela. Since Gary and I walked the Camino in 2019, I felt a nudging to use her book as part of my own Lenten journey this year.

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