Saunter.
Genesis 1:1 In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth… 1:31 Then God looked over all he had made, and he saw that it was very good!
I recently read the book ‘Walking’ by Henry David Thoreau. It struck a chord in my heart and reminded me that we are part of His creation in a much deeper level. In our man-made everything, we have a tendency to get caught up in the world we create as humans and take for granted or look past the Truth that we are part of His creation just like the wild animals, mountains, oceans, and every little wild flower in between.
“I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute Freedom and Wildness, as contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil, – to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature, rather than a member of society…. For sauntering, which word is beautifully derived ‘from idle people who roved about the country, in the Middle Ages, and asked charity, under pretense of going á la Sainte Terre,’ to the Holy Land, till the children exclaimed, “There goes a Sainte-Terrer,’ a Saunterer, a Holy Lander. They who never go to the Holy Land in their walks, as they pretend, are indeed mere idlers and vagabonds; but they who do go there are saunterers in the good sense, such as I mean. Some, however, would derive the word from sans terre without land or a home, which, therefore, in the good sense, will mean, having no particular home, but equally at home everywhere.”
Henry Davie Thoreau, Walking
So over past couple months, I have been working on my saunter. Without agenda to exercise or get some where, I have taken to sauntering about the fields by our house with the pure purpose of visiting the Holy Land, also known as, drawing closer to God… simply being part of His Creation, Nature, the natural… simply being His. Knowing and resting in the Truth that there is a far greater purpose for our existence than the ‘civil business of life’… we were created to be part of God’s creation and to know intimately The Creator. Praise God!
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