by Pastor Douglas Brauner

…Not a Tourist

You can listen to today’s devotion by clicking on this SoundCloud link.

My word for this year is “focus” as I navigate the fourth quarter of my life. I’m nearly three years into my retirement from pastoring God’s people. You cannot survive pastoring for nearly forty years without focus. Retirement is another bird.

I’m reading the book, The Fourth Quarter of Your Life: Embracing What Matters Most, by Allen Hunt and Matthew Kelly, a book I highly recommend. The authors make the distinction between living life as a tourist or a pilgrim. Tourists are sightseers and count the cost. Pilgrims look for meaning and count their blessings. Yes, this sounds simplistic, but it is rather profound.

Part of each one of us lives as though the world owes us something, as if it owes us heaven now, something God never promised us. We wait for life to happen to us and get angry when things don’t go the way we expect. We want a perpetual Disney story where it always ends, “And they lived happily ever after.” That is the life of a tourist, but it isn’t the life that Jesus promised us.

“[Jesus said,] ‘I have said these things to you, that in me you may have peace. In the world you will have tribulation. But take heart; I have overcome the world.’”
John 16:33 English Standard Version

Jesus experienced the violence of sin on a cross withing hours of speaking these words, bleeding for humanity that was stuck in its rebellion against his Father. It is through Christ, and Christ alone, that you and I experience the conversion from being tourists who are angry that life isn’t what we expect, to pilgrims who count their blessings and look for God’s hand in our mundane human existence.

I’m still on a journey of understanding what it means to approach this last quarter of my life as a pilgrim rather than a tourist, however, this journey is worth the effort.

Copyright Family of Christ Lutheran Church, Colorado Springs, Colorado