Rev. Dr. Katie Givens Kime
Rick Steves, welcome to Day1! We're so happy to have you here.

Rick Steves
Thank you Katie. Nice to be with you.

Rev. Dr. Katie Givens Kime
I love that the Washington Post, this year, referred to you as the "Mr. Rogers of Travel," and we especially love that over here because Rev. Fred Rogers himself preached on this program February 1st, 1976.

And so, Rick, many of us have learned to see the world differently through your eyes, with curiosity and with kindness and wonder. So how has your Christian faith shaped the way you see the world and the way you travel through it?

Rick Steves
It's interesting you introduced me with a comment about Fred Rogers because I love the thought that—I think it's like Martin Luther called it the "priesthood of all believers." I love that. [voice cracks] I couldn't be a pastor in church because I always break up when I talk about these kinds of things. But I love to find my niche and then do it, inspired by my faith and to believe that I can impact people through my work in a secular world.

So in a way, I'm witnessing when I travel and I leave home. I believe you can learn more about home by leaving it and looking at it from a distance. And you can recognize that "love your neighbor" has nothing to do with proximity. I just don't buy this business that, "Oh, they're right across the street, love them." No, we're all children of God. And if you believe in God, whether you go to church or whether you're Christian or if you're a Muslim—if you just believe in God—you know that logically it follows we're all children of God.

And that makes us all brothers and sisters. Everybody. Everybody! Gay, black, white, tall, short, fat, skinny, you name it! We're all equally beautiful children of God. Wow!

When you travel, you connect with that idea. When you travel, you celebrate the diversity of this planet, and when you travel, you realize that this world's a beautiful place.

It's filled with joy, it's filled with love, it's filled with need. And if we wanna love our neighbor, connect with the world. I love connecting with the world. It's such a beautiful thing.

Rev. Dr. Katie Givens Kime
And you do it so well. Besides "loving thy neighbor," such a powerful Christian contribution, are there other uniquely Christian perspectives or pieces of our faith that really help guide you, or that you think are helpful for all the world?

Rick Steves
"Love thy enemy." Is that a—get to know your enemy? I think that's biblical.

I'm sorry, I'm kind of a—I'm no theologian, but this whole notion of "love your enemy."

I love to go where my government says I'm not supposed to go. There's something about it. If my government says I can't go there, it's high on my bucket list.

Nicaragua, Cuba, Iran, Palestine. I've written a book called Travel as a Political Act. It's my favorite book, and I've written 60 or 70 books, and this is the book that is my passion—the fire in my belly.

And it could be called Travel as a Spiritual Act. All you gotta do is do a little quick search and replace. And when I give a talk, my Travel as a Political Act talk, I can give it at a Christian college and call it Travel as a Spiritual Act. And half of that book is written from experiences that I gained by traveling to those kinds of places.

Because there we realize how we're all in this together, and we realize the beauty of getting people to people.

When I travel to a place like Iran or Cuba, they get to know me as an American. And it makes it tougher for their propaganda to dehumanize me, and it makes it tougher for the propaganda in my country to dehumanize them. When I get home, and we get to know each other in a fundamental way.

And I think that's a major tenet in a lot of religions. I've been thinking about this—religions are stories of people on the road, certainly the case in Christianity, and think about Mohammed and Islam.

One of the five pillars of Islam is the Hajj, that means take a pilgrimage. Christians go to Santiago, Christians go to Rome, Christians go to Međugorje or whatever, Muslims go to Mecca.

And a modern interpretation of that Muslim tenet is: learn about your home by leaving it and looking at it from a distance. Learn about who you are in the big picture, who you are in relation to God, by leaving home and getting around other people.

And modern Muslims interpret that command by Mohammed that if you can help it, leave your home and go to Mecca. It's just, if you can at all help it, go see a different part of the world. Mohammed said, "Don't tell me how educated you are, tell me how much you've traveled." I love that.

And something in my teaching—I've looked at my teaching over the years and I've evolved to see that travel can be three things: you can be a tourist, you can be a traveler, or you can be a pilgrim.

Now, I don't wanna be just a bon vivant and a hedonist and a playboy, or I don't wanna be a monk, but I wanna mix it all up together. And I can see the road as playground and be a tourist, I can see the road as school and be a traveler, or I can see the road as church, or synagogue, or mosque and be a pilgrim. And the fun thing is, you can mix it all up.

Now, in our society, the default is be a tourist—fun in the sun, hang out with people just like you, drink margaritas. Nothing wrong with that. That's a vacation, but it's a lost opportunity. And if you can configure your travels to mix being a tourist, traveler, and pilgrim, then you have a transformational experience. You become one with the world, with humanity, with creation, instead of cloistered here in your little world where everything is comfortable and you really don't have a very broad perspective.

I just love that, it carbonates my life! And some people tell me, "We travel every year, we go to Cancun, we go to Mazatlán, we go to Orlando, we go to Vegas, we go back to Orlando. We go back to Orlando. We go to Disneyland, and then we go to Cancun again, and then we go to Vegas,

Rev. Dr. Katie Givens Kime
Then back to Orlando. [Laughter]

Rick Steves
That's la-la land, that's not travel. And for me, I'm all about "reality" travel. I wanna travel to get out of my comfort zone. Culture shock is a blessing, it's not something to avoid.

Culture shock is the growing pains of a broadening perspective, getting to know God's great creation, and it needs to be curated. That's what I do as a travel teacher and a travel writer, but a lot of travel teachers help you avoid culture shock.

That's like taking the pulp out of the orange juice, ya know?

Rev. Dr. Katie Givens Kime
Yeah, no. [Laughs] Why? You're denied the experience of the growth?

Rick Steves
Yup, right, exactly.

Rev. Dr. Katie Givens Kime
Well, when it comes to the Christmas story and the Nativity story, of course, there are some bits in there, going back to what you said about what the government says you should do and where you should travel—about going to another land, about being a stranger. What resonates with you when you think about Mary and Joseph?

The story we as Christians have inherited about what happened then—what jumps out to you there?

Rick Steves
Well, for me, it's really important not to be chronocentric in our lives and in our faith. I don't like to be ethnocentric, and I don't like to be chronocentric. I don't like to look through everything through the sensibilities of a person living in this year, in this time of ours. And when I'm traveling in the Holy Land, it's my challenge to try to understand what it would have been like 2,000 years ago.

And that was when the Roman Empire was it, and everybody was cowering under this dictatorial rule, which we have a hard time imagining—a very hard time. And if God was gonna send down somebody to make God flesh on this planet—a human being who is God in some way, that can empathize with us and walk with us—He could have sent somebody with trumpets and fanfare on the top of a mountain who was met by the Roman Empire, and they would walk arm in arm down into the people and tell them what it was all about. Or He could have sent somebody to make a point that this is the pithy essence of life: I'm right there in the trenches with you, the son of a carpenter born in a little cave. Ha ha, in a difficult time.

And I love the strength of a bright star in a very dark night. The darker the night, the brighter the star—and Jesus was a bright light in a dark sky. And it just shines, and that's, you know, [chokes up] I love that, I just love that. And I'm thankful for my faith. And I'm thankful for my travels, and I'm thankful for my sensibility of trying to understand that lessons and experiences, and valor, and faith, and awe and love—2,000 years ago. It's perfectly applicable to the lives of a privileged American in this day and age.

Rev. Dr. Katie Givens Kime
Isn't it? It's actually stunning, it never stops being stunning.

Rick Steves
Yeah, but people—a lot of people that haven't thought about it much or haven't traveled much—they can't imagine somebody that doesn't have a smartphone and isn't computer literate and doesn't drive a car, or doesn't, you know, all this stuff that we can do. They can't imagine talking on an equal basis with somebody in a whole different age. When the stars were brighter and people didn't live as well, but the issues were just the same.

And I love that. I really love that, and it's a challenge to me to understand it better.

Rev. Dr. Katie Givens Kime
Yes. And constantly, our faith practices and our Scripture give us so many opportunities for growing and learning—as does travel, for sure.

Rick Steves
Yeah, yeah. It really does. And for me, it's a beautiful thing to be able to, in my travels, gather together little "eurekas!" Little experiences. People ask me what's my favorite church? A lot of times, I'd say it's walking on a ridge high in the Alps, surrounded by the glory of Creation, and it's tightroping on a ridge. On one side, you've got lakes stretching all the way to Germany; on the other side, you've got the most incredible alpine panorama. It's enough to—I always feel—it's enough to make a Lutheran go like this [looks up and holds his hands to heaven], you know? That's where I can go, yeah!

Rev. Dr. Katie Givens Kime
Yup. So at Day1, we have a long tradition—and actually, Lutherans were with us right at the beginning—of being an ecumenical production celebrating all mainline Christian denominations. Tell me a little bit about—you identify as Lutheran. Tell me a little bit about what that means to you.

Rick Steves
That's an interesting story because my grandparents came over from Norway and the family's just—Christian is Lutheran, you know.

Rev. Dr. Katie Givens Kime
Right.

Rick Steves
And if you're Italian, Christian is Catholic.

Rev. Dr. Katie Givens Kime
Yup.

Rick Steves
If you're Greek, Christian is Orthodox.

But then I've had a chance in my early adulthood to be skeptical and cynical and think it through and challenge it. And I just love Martin Luther's outlook on life—his honesty, his grittiness, his concept of being saved by grace, and his understanding that we can be the priesthood of all believers. To me, that's the biggest, the most wonderful license to live out our faith.

And I like the simplicity of my Christian faith. There's not a lot of dogma, there's not a lot of things I have to pick and choose from. I mean, I'm thankful there are people that get their religious jollies off organized faith that makes you pick and choose what you're really gonna embrace. That's right for some people, you know? But I don't need to pick and choose anything out of my Lutheran faith. It's all there.

Martin Luther—he's 500 years ago—he could be walking and talking and preaching today, and people would just say, Amen. He could be doing that. Well, the more you know about Martin Luther, the cooler he is.

Rev. Dr. Katie Givens Kime
Yes, I think that's true.

Rick Steves
Some of my favorite travels have been going to all the Luther sites in Germany. I had a great experience making a one-hour documentary on the Reformation and Martin Luther for public television, and it was so fun. Because I wanted it, of course, to be taught in Lutheran churches for Sunday school and in the new members classes, you know, so people could understand—what's this Lutheran heritage?

But I also wanted it to be acceptable from a Roman Catholic point of view, which I have great respect for. And I also wanted it to be embraced in secular media as not proselytizing. To write this 7,000-word script, ticking all those boxes, was a big challenge. I wanted to tell the fascinating and fun story of Martin Luther's life. But I also wanted to get into the theology of what is the Lutheran approach to God? And I wanted to get into the challenges of the day.

How did Luther—when Catholic didn't mean universal, when there was only one way to get to heaven and that was through Rome—how did Martin Luther— Other guys had tried, but they all burned. They failed. How did Martin Luther put that together? It's an amazing story.

Rev. Dr. Katie Givens Kime
It is an amazing story.

Rick Steves
And I had that—I brought it out just in time to send a DVD to every Lutheran, all 10,000 ELCA congregations—in hopes that it's in their library and they'll be playing it. Well, we've gone beyond DVDs now, but a lot of churches still use it. Any denomination can use it because the Reformation is such an important thing—500 years ago, but of course, we celebrated the 500th anniversary of Martin Luther pounding those notes on the door—

Rev. Dr. Katie Givens Kime
Um hmm. Not so long ago. That's right.

Rick Steves
— in 2017. And people can watch it. If anybody wants to watch that one-hour show or use it, you can watch it for free on the Public Television app, on PBS Passport, or you can just go to my website, RickSteves.com, and go to the TV section. All my TV shows are there, and a lot of them are inspired by my faith.

The 500th anniversary of Martin Luther and the Reformation. I wrote a program on the Holy Land, which is very applicable today, and I wrote a program called Hunger and Hope: Lessons Learned from Ethiopia and Guatemala, which is a powerful show among many other shows.

But those are the three that would be applicable for anybody trying to see my faith—how I live out my faith in my work as a travel teacher and a TV producer.

Rev. Dr. Katie Givens Kime
Thank you for those, and we will link those exact things on our episode page. I love that you'll gesture to history—always using some architecture or a painting or something that's happened. And in these one-sentence bites, you do such a beautiful job of also really nailing how this is important, a little bit, to you. Like, you'll get there, and it's like—it's fantastic!

Rick Steves
Thank you, Katie. Well, that was such a fun experience to be able to—you know, I got to read some books about Martin Luther and learn things I didn't know otherwise. I made friends in Wittenberg, and it was a little bit tough to—it's called "covering."

You have to cover the script with something to look at. When I'm on camera, it's usually because I'm talking about a concept that you cannot cover by looking at a castle or something. And of course, with Martin Luther, there are no videos from the time, there's not a lot. It's pretty tough to make it visually alive like other things.

So we went to every great— When we found a painting of "Here I Stand, I Can Do No Other," or whatever, "great, get that!" That covers that. And for me, just the thought that, until Martin Luther, the word of God was limited to Latin.

So it had to be interpreted and doled out according to people who spoke Latin—who were elites, part of the church, which was tied in with the government. And it's been two against one—the church and the government against the peasants—for so many years. And why was Martin Luther so influential?

He translated the word of God into the local language so you and I could read it, and that was—

Rev. Dr. Katie Givens Kime
Language and media, yep.

Rick Steves
That empowered the people in the pews. And Luther was—I'm also interested in propaganda and marketing and all this kind of stuff—and Martin Luther, his best buddy, Cranach, was a great political cartoonist. And Martin Luther knew how to write in a colloquial way, like I do.

And Martin Luther happened to live just after Gutenberg invented the printing press, so he could write in a way that people liked to read, he could print it. So Gutenberg was also very influential because he made information affordable. And he illustrated it with a real edginess—with that Cranach—and put it all together at a time when the Roman Catholic Church was more aggressive than ever at keeping people down, misleading them about stuff so they could get people buying their way into heaven, and so on.

It's a fascinating story, and he pulled it off, and it's one of the most thrilling stories—and we're beneficiaries of it to this day. So go Martin Luther! Yeah!

Rev. Dr. Katie Givens Kime
Yes, Martin Luther! We thank you. Yep. So every year, Rick, the Christmas story meets us again in whatever darkness we are living through, personal or global. So where have you seen light breaking through lately?

Rick Steves
You know, I like to be inspired by people of great faith, and somebody that really connects with me is Rev. Dr. Mitri Rahab. For 30 years, he was the pastor at Christmas Lutheran Church in Bethlehem, and he's an amazing guy.

He's committed his whole life to peace and justice in the West Bank, in Palestine, and he's a Christian leader. Palestine has a Christian community, and it's tough for Christians in the Holy Land now.

But Palestine—actually, in the West Bank—there's a law they've incorporated into their society, safeguards. So they always have Christians and people in positions of power, and the mayor of Bethlehem will always be a Christian, that's just the law.

You have to be a Christian to be the mayor of Bethlehem. If there's one Christian left in Bethlehem, that's the mayor. And Mitri has this beautiful church and a beautiful school, and a beautiful program bringing kids from different parts of the community together peacefully and giving them something joyful, and something promising, and something not war-torn like so many Palestinians are living through right now.

And in his church once, with an incursion—Israel's got its reasonable concerns about its safety, and I'm all for Israeli safety and all that kind of stuff—but the Israelis broke the windows as they were crashing through his school and the chapel, and all that stained glass fell down and broke.

And Mitri gathered the broken shards of that glass, and the next Christmas, this was the ornaments of Christmas—[sobbing]—on the Christmas tree. That's what Mitri does. He takes the broken shards of his windows and he hangs them on the Christmas tree the next year, in a spirit of "let's just live together, and let's focus on what's right and celebrate our differences."

And that's—I've never told that story and I've never kind of cried when I said it—but that is inspiring to me. And I get to stumble under those kinds of things because I'm out there just doing my travels. And there are so many of those beautiful people. The world's filled with beautiful people in the places you'd expect to find it least.

I was in Cuba on New Year's Eve one year. And I didn't want to go to the rooftop of the fancy hotel with all the tourists having their $100 party on the poolside. I told my family, "We're just going to walk the back streets until we find a party and we're going to get invited in."

We walked the back streets of Havana. It was approaching midnight, and in a ramshackle house, a man said, "Hey, Happy New Year, come on in!" We went in and we climbed up this haunted house stairway, and then we got up into this room. There were three generations of a Cuban family having a party, and they said, "Would you like a drink?" and I go, "Yeah, do you have a beer?" And they go "No, we only have rum"

[Laughter]

All they had was a bottle of rum.

Rev. Dr. Katie Givens Kime
Really good rum too!.

Rick Steves
Yeah, good rum. And we had the time of our lives dancing with these beautiful people. It was humble, and it was more joyful than the people spending $100 a night poolside—it was infinitely more joyful, infinitely more loving and real.

And it was in the manger instead of in the palace.

Rev. Dr. Katie Givens Kime
There it is.

Rick Steves
And that was a beautiful, beautiful thing. And those kinds of things stay with you.

I mean, we're supposed to consider 70 million Iranians our enemies, and for most Americans, you know, "USA! USA!" I'm as patriotic as the next American. I think I'm more patriotic in a lot of ways. And when I'm in Iran, I'm taking notes, baby, I'm taking notes. I was filming in Iran, in the streets of Tehran—there are 12 million people in Tehran or something. It's a big city, lots of traffic jams.

And we're stuck in a traffic jam, just in silence, and the man in the next car asked my driver to roll down the window. He did this [mimics rolling down window]. My driver rolls down the window, and the man hands over a bouquet of flowers.

And he says, "Give this to the foreigner in your back seat and apologize for our traffic."

And whoa. He didn't know who I was—I was just a foreigner. I'm just a white guy in the back seat. And he was ashamed of the traffic and the inconvenience it was causing us. And I don't know about your city, but in Seattle, that never happens on the freeway.

But it just reminded me—this world is filled with beautiful people, beautiful children of God. And if you don't get out and get to know that, your worldview is shaped by fear-mongering commercial TV news, and you become a very frightened person.

And people with crosses hanging from their necks are telling us we need walls, and we need to barricade ourselves from the other 96% of humanity outside of our walls. And we are exceptional. The only thing exceptional about Americans in God's eyes is our ability to think that we're exceptional in God's eyes.

It's a loony idea. If there's anything exceptional about us, it's with our privilege. We should be out there doing more in the world. And I'm so determined to talk up the beauty of bridges and the folly of walls—we need bridges we can bring to—The best way we can witness to the rest of this world is to love the rest of this world.

Just live out our compassion and love our neighbors in a way that ignores proximity. I'm into getting more bang out of my buck, whether it's as a traveler, or as a philanthropist, or as a Christian. And I just know there are real needs south of our border, there's real ability to help out north of the border.

And why on earth we're pulling back instead of reaching out is beyond me.

Rev. Dr. Katie Givens Kime
That you keep on inspiring us, and you keep on talking across the bridges, and that you keep on building the bridges. What a sign of your faith, Rick, and please, as you've been told many times, keep up the good work.

Rick Steves
I finish every TV show, Katie, by saying, "Keep on travelin'," and there's a lot to that. Keep on travelin'. You can think about that—you could build a whole sermon on that.

Keep on travelin', and God bless everybody on this beautiful planet of ours.

I loved SO many insights and gems from our Day1 Interview with Rick Steves – top among them is the way he helps us understand two powerful images of the Advent season: the light and the road.

First, there is the light. Rick shared with us a Scripture passage from the Gospel of John. John tells us, at the very beginning of his Gospel, that in Christ was life, and that life was the light of all people. And then John adds a line that feels almost whispered, like holy defiance. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overtake it.

We hear those words every Advent, but they never grow old, do they? Who doesn't cherish this advent promise: The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overtake it. Part of the reason we love these words about light is that every year, as the December days bring the chilling frost, we all can name at least five things happening in the world that make us tilt our heads and say, "Really? Light? Now? It seems awfully dark!" John is telling the truth we need most. The story of God does not begin with daylight. It begins in the dark. And yet, in the dark, the light is already shining.

And then our conversation with Rick reminds us of a second powerful Advent image: the journey, the road. Advent invites us to notice not only the light, but the road. Scripture is full of traveling people. Joseph and Mary, very pregnant, on the road to Bethlehem. Shepherds out walking because sheep are not impressively self-managing animals. Magi crossing borders under nothing but starlight and a sense that something holy was happening.

Faith is a ROAD. And traveling the road is not always straight, nor predictable. Sometimes we are not even sure we are traveling the correct road, sometimes we are oblivious to what we are seeing on the road.

I travelled to, and ended up living in rural Idaho right after college, way back in 2001, while serving as an AmeriCorps volunteer, as well as a waitress in the local diner. I was a city girl who'd never lived west of Wisconsin, with absolutely no idea how to live in a place where winter is not a "season" but a character-building experience. SO MUCH SNOW. I took what I thought was the correct road to get to the preschool where I was teaching. I was feeling very confident. I had just read a brochure about my Jeep's 4-wheel drive. And, better than that, I'd figured out what it meant to put STUDS on my tires, and had made that happen!

Halfway up, around a bend, the road turned into pure ice hairpin turn. I spun, then stopped, and saw in my rearview mirror a man standing off to the side, futzing with a snowmobile. "Miss, you know this is not even a road, right? This is a snowmobile trail."

"Oh, uh thank you."

"You know you are supposed to take the plastic OFF your studded tires, right?" I did not. I had been sliding around town like Bambi on ice, wondering why studs on tires were supposedly so helpful.

I felt very awkward about letting this man help me get the plastic off my tires – being a needy damsel in distress not my jam. Then I realized WHO this guy was, as he was helping me – he was part of group of 3 guys I recognized as regulars at the diner where I waitressed, and I did NOT like them. Opposite political views from me, among other things. And yet. Here he was, helping me... we stayed friends from then on, and I ended up laughing with and learning a lot from him after that unexpected, embarrassing day on the ROAD.

It turns out that the Greek word for road in the New Testament is hodos. It means the literal road, yes, but it also means a way of life. The earliest Christians did not call themselves a religion. They called themselves The Way. It was never just about where you were going. It was about who walked beside you.

In the Gospel of Luke, HODOS, "road" is used in the Emmaus story. The disciples walk the entire road with Jesus but somehow do not recognize him even though they walked the whole afternoon together. Only later do they say, "did not our hearts burn within us on the road?" Their eyes caught up to what their hearts already knew. Which, again, is deeply reassuring for the rest of us who often recognize God only in hindsight.

But when we travel the road with God, the Advent road, the road to Bethlehem and to the Christ child, the unexpected, the surprising encounter, is around every turn. Rick reminded us that spiritual growth rarely happens while we are perfectly comfortable with a latte and a strong Wi Fi signal. Much as I would love that. Growth sneaks up on us in the layovers, the delays, the reroutes, and the moments when we find ourselves muttering, "Really, God? This road?"

When it comes to ROADS we travel, Rick shared how travel can look like a playground, which is delightful. A school, which is informative. Or a church, which is where transformation happens. A tourist seeks comfort, like a playground. A traveler seeks knowledge, like a school. A pilgrim seeks God. A pilgrim expects to be surprised, and even challenged.

Pilgrims are on the journey toward the unexpected, the dark and difficult road that is traveled with the surprising God as our companion, that the light often breaks through. Rick's story from Bethlehem that felt like a modern parable in this way.

He told us about Rev. Dr. Mitri Raheb, pastor of the Evangelical Lutheran Christmas Church in Bethlehem, whose church once suffered a military incursion that shattered all the stained-glass windows. The fragments fell everywhere. But the next Christmas, after Mitri had gathered the broken shards, he hung them on the Christmas tree as ornaments. It was his way of saying that even in the most fractured places, the Light still shines. Even broken pieces can reflect the light. That is not sentimental. That is gospel logic. The darker the night, the brighter the star.

Now, as Christians, we are not asked to pretend the darkness is not real. If you have ever gone through a December and thought, "This is not quite the cozy Hallmark montage I was promised," you are in very good and very biblical company. The darkness is real. But John tells us the darkness does not win. The Light is stronger.

Rick also shared that story about being stuck in traffic in Tehran, and the man in the next car asked his driver to roll down the window. Then the man passed a bouquet of flowers through the window and said, "Please give this to the foreigner in your back seat and apologize for our traffic." I cannot imagine that anyone in the history of ever has, in Atlanta, handed anyone flowers on I 285 to apologize for traffic. Yet, there on the road, in a traffic jam in Tehran, we see a reflection of the light that opens the world. The light that helps us see beauty where we expected nothing. The light that helps us see neighbors where we expected strangers. It helps us see the presence of Christ, while traveling the very road we thought was going nowhere.

We can't talk about TRAVELING and the Christmas Story, of course, without the Magi, especially that single small detail in Matthew's account of the Magi. After they visit the Christ child, Matthew says the Magi "went home by another way." It is one sentence. Easy to miss. Once you encounter the Light, you are changed, you cannot go back the way you came. You go home by another way because the old road no longer fits who you are becoming.

And maybe that is the invitation of Christmas again this year. Not to rush in our travels to the brightness of Christmas morning. Not to pretend everything is fine, but instead, to walk the often dark road we have been given with eyes open for the holy, searching for the light. To trust that the Light is already shining. To believe that our broken pieces can still shimmer with grace. To notice the quiet ways Christ is traveling beside us, even when we are not yet ready to recognize him.

So, let's keep an eye out for the reflections of stained-glass ornaments. Let's keep seeking surprise. Let's keep trusting that Christ, the Light of all people, is already shining on the path you are taking, even if, at times, you wish the path looked different than it does. Let's keep paying attention for the small gifts of joy and kindness and grace that show up as we travel the road in front of us.

Near the end of our conversation, Rick mentions that he ends every television episode with the same phrase. "Keep on travelin'." He pauses and says, "You could build a whole sermon on that."

Amen, Rick. Amen.

• Travel as a Political Act – Book by Rick Steves
• Touring for a Dose of “Reality” – Article by Rick Steves
• Luther and the Reformation – Rick Steves TV Special
• The Holy Land: Israelis and Palestinians Today – Rick Steves TV Special
• Hunger and Hope: Lessons from Ethiopia and Guatemala – Rick Steves Documentary
• Rev. Dr. Mitri Raheb – Christmas Lutheran Church in Bethlehem