When I visited the Holy Land, being where Jesus was born, taught, performed miraculous healings, and was crucified was enormously impactful.
My favorite part was the region of Galilee. I loved walking along the shore of the Sea of Galilee, imagining Jesus calling His disciples, walking on water, sleeping in a fishing boat during a storm, and cooking breakfast for the disciples after His resurrection.
While our tour group visited a nearby church, I enjoyed lingering along the seashore in the area commemorating Jesus’s reinstatement of Peter and thought about my own denials. When I went to the Church of the Beatitudes, standing by the hillside where Jesus delivered the Sermon on the Mount, I listened as a fellow traveler read aloud the beatitudes.
No trip I’ve taken remains etched in my mind like the Holy Land. Why is this? Just being where Jesus lived made His presence profoundly real to me. I experienced a peace beyond peace, perhaps shalom, that Eugene Peterson describes as “life in all its abundance, which we have brimming over from Christ living inside us.”
Dear Jesus, thank You for being a Lord we don’t have to travel to find and who comes to us where we are so that we can experience shalom from Your presence always within us. Amen.
—John Dilworth
