In the summer of 2016, our camper pulled into the parking lot of First Presbyterian Church in Golden, Colorado, where my friend Mimi Dixon was in her third decade of pastoral service.

By this time our family had been full-time RVing for several months. Novelty had long given way to the reality of five humans, ages two to thirty-six, sharing three hundred square feet.

Mimi offered to let me work at a table in her office during our three weeks there. The experienced marked me.

Someone would pop in without an appointment and Mimi would stop what she was doing and offer her full attention. Again and again, people came by and without fail each was given unhurried presence. She got her work done, but the priority was always people, not tasks.

Before we hit the road again, Mimi handed me a book titled The Wisdom of Stability. I smiled. It was a pastoral nudge to put down the roots our souls desperately needed. Be a pilgrim, she seemed to be saying, but not a nomad.

For our family, that long RV adventure was a kind of pilgrimage to find wonder, authentic community, and a deeper dependence upon God. These we found, but usually where we least expected — and often that place was at the end of ourselves.

Renovaré President Ted Harro recently returned from a pilgrimage of his own, walking the Camino de Santiago with his son. Like our RV adventure, nothing went as planned and the journey was cut short. ​“If I had to give the whole trip a title,” he said on the podcast this week, ​“it would be A Journey in Humility.” (You can also read Ted’s reflections here.)

Followers of Jesus are disciples and pilgrims, Eugene Peterson reminds us. In one sense, our whole life is a pilgrimage of slowly making our way home to God. But we also need intentional pilgrimages, because journey begets transformation. This may be as dramatic as a year in an RV or a month in Spain, or as simple as spending a day intentionally noticing the sunlight (as this practice by Rev. Laura Rasmussen invites us to do).