On October 7, I went to my office to purchase flights to Tel Aviv for November of 2023. Our internship program has three major trips enveloped into its curriculum. The first trip is to Israel, a spiritual formation and learning trip where we follow the footsepts of Christ in the land of the Bible. We were all excited about going on this journey. But when I went to my computer, I noticed that Israel was attacked and decided to hold off on purchasing those tickets, after a few days, we realized that a trip to Israel was not going to happen in the near future.
We decided to look at alternative trips and chose to go to Spain and walk a portion of the El Camino. A pilgrimage that many people went on over the last 1000 years. The purpose of a pilgrimage is to walk with our God in a foreign land learning about ourselves, our faith, our relationship to others, both friends and strangers. We hope to have some amazing experience where spiritual formation happens.
We have been reading The Patient Ferment of the Early Church by Alan Kreider, and now we are entering a country that has hosted Christianity since the first century. Church tradition informs us that James, the disciple of Jesus, came to Spain before being the first Apostle to die for his faith. Going to a country that has so much Christian heritage will be an amazing experience. Walking over 100 km in six days will be a journey for our soul.
Our first flight was to Toronto and we met up with Artur Esau, spending a night at the Markham Missionary Church. We had a late supper, got a bit of sleep and had a devotional on Wednesday morning. We also celebrated Nat’s birthday with a carrot cake and a rendition of ‘Happy Birthday’ - she turned 20 in Toronto! Artur and Joel were great hosts and we had a good time of sharing and prayer. It was great to be there!
We are now in Madrid and it is Thursday Morning. We are waiting for our connection to Vigo. We will then have a taxi to Tui where we will be starting our journey. Exciting stuff!!
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