Walking with God: An Introduction

Throughout history, walking outside in nature has been a sacred activity, a way of encountering God, and in turn, our true selves. R. S. Thomas describes encountering God out walking on the Moor. Being out there, for him, felt like entering a church, a holy space, where, “what God was there made himself felt, Not listened to, in clean colours that brought a moistening of the eye, in movement of the wind over grass”. Another poet, David Whyte, writes of how sometimes it is spending time in nature that reveals our own depths to us. In his poem The Journey, he says, “Sometimes it takes a great sky to find that first, bright and indescribable wedge of freedom in your own heart”. The book of Proverbs in Scripture also speaks of a God who enjoys God’s creation, whose Spirit is “at play everywhere on the earth, delighting” to be with us. This is a moment to spend time with God, in the creation God has deemed, “very good”.