Your Journey Matters

By Shane Stanford

May/June 2024

Our journeys matter. Yes, our destination is important, but it is the journey that makes us who we are.

Some of my sweetest memories are of family road trips over the years. My wife and daughters and I have literally traveled across the country, spending time together, exploring exciting places, and attending interesting events. However, the most important part of each adventure – and the focus of most of our pictures from those travels – was simply our being together.

I recently watched a news report that included “migration” as one of the core indicators of a culture’s progress. It said that “movement” – the journeys of a culture from place to place – identifies what that culture considers critical to its identity and longevity.

I’ve experienced my own “migration” in life. I don’t live in the same house where I was born or even the house where I grew up. Some people do, and that is certainly okay. But most people don’t. And the story of how a person got from the home(s) where they grew up to the home where they currently live helps to describe and define the very nature of who they are and what they have learned along the way. Movement brings identity.

Similarly, I don’t believe it is a coincidence that Jesus spent his ministry years moving from one place to another. He didn’t begin his ministry in Nazareth where he grew up. No, his ministry started at Cana in Galilee, and his earthly journey ended in Jerusalem. And, between Cana and Jerusalem, he traveled throughout the region, dealing with unfamiliar places and foreign people like the Samaritans while, at the same time, coming to terms with the truth that “he couldn’t go home to Nazareth” either (see Luke 4:24). Yes, he was a Nazarene, but that was just one part of his story. Jesus’ journey helped to define and clarify who he was.

Even more than that, Jesus’ journey changed the world, defining and clarifying all of its people and nations, for all time.

My personal journey has had its share of struggles and learning moments. I have now lived nearly forty years as a “positive” after receiving a blood transfusion to treat hemophilia. That is the lingo we attach to someone who is HIV-positive, whether we say it from within the HIV community or from the sidelines. It means many things to many different people: it is a test result, a way of life, a question of morality, a lifestyle, a badge, a condition, or a burden.

For me, it has been all of those things at various stops along the road. However, “positive” is, more than anything, the story of my journey. My journey includes chapters involving great illness and medical obstacles, personal betrayal in one of my most important relationships, and having the first church where I was appointed as pastor reject me. I have also dealt with many of the normal avenues of life, including marriage, parenting, friendships, and professional commitments. I have founded a new local church and a new center for applied theology. And, of course, I have traveled to countless points and places in between these marks on my life road map.

I think most of us are overwhelmed by the journey of life. We encounter so much that is hard, so much that is bad – to such a degree that if we knew today what would happen a year or a decade from now, we might not take that next step. But there is also good in our journeys. And there are stops along the way that we are proud of. There is growing and learning and so much that is positive.

Seeing from a different perspective. In 2014, I went from being the senior pastor of a church that was considered one of the top 25 fastest growing United Methodist churches in the world to sitting in a waiting room at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, dealing with the liver disease that I had contracted back when I was 19 years old. My liver had gotten to the point of late, stage-three cirrhosis.

I began a new treatment. For the next two and a half years we went through 140 weeks of targeted drug therapy and then chemotherapy. Finally, it worked, and my liver was cured. But the journey to get to that point had been very hard. I remember a lot in my own soul, my own spirit trying to figure out what it all meant.

Coming out of that experience in 2017, we took a trip down to Mexico to build houses for people in need. We’d done this before (and we’ve done it since), and so much of the trip felt pretty standard. My wife, our girls, people on our ministry team, and I flew into San Diego and drove a couple hours south to Ensenada where we met with a local church there and loved on people by building homes.

But I’ll never forget this particular year. The pastor’s wife there, “Pastora,” had a strong connection to the Spirit, and we knew her well. She and her husband had connected us over the years to people in need. But on this particular night when I got done preaching to their congregation, Pastora came up to me and told me that she had heard a word from the Lord and that she wanted to pray with me.

She invited my wife and daughters to join, and as she prayed I noticed that she motioned to a few of the young men to come up and stand around me – and I felt my stomach sink. I grew up Baptist. I love my charismatic brothers and sisters dearly, but I could tell that Pastora wanted to heal me in the way that I thought only televangelists heal people. She was going to touch my head, and then she expected me to pass out and the young men would catch me, and that would be it. Simple, right?

I was beyond nervous. All I could think about was how much I didn’t want to embarrass her. How much I didn’t want her to realize that this thing that works for her doesn’t work for me.

I wasn’t thinking about what God could be doing. I wasn’t thinking about the possibility of a miracle. Nope, I was worried about how things would look when she failed.

And that’s the last thing I remember.

She dipped her finger in the oil, touched me on the forehead, and I went completely out. The people around me would later tell me that it was as if I floated back, and then the guys there caught me.

I woke up, sitting on the ground in a way that I would never normally sit due to past hemophilia injuries, and I remember feeling as well as I’d ever felt in my life. Nothing hurt or ached, which alone seemed to be a miracle because my body always hurts, always aches. But more than that – the thing that had gotten into my soul was the fact that I kept hearing a voice while I was out. Over and over, the voice said, “It’s about me. It’s about me.”

Ten years before that, I’d had heart surgery to correct some issues that medication had caused, and when I was coming out of that surgery, I remember sitting at the end of what appeared to be a long, white hall, and a man who I believed to be Jesus sat next to me. And he kept saying to me those very same words. “It’s about me.”

To hear those words again, after having the anointing from Pastora, I knew that God was getting my attention. He wanted me to focus on something other than leading a large church or trying to be the right kind of theologian.

Jesus wanted me to really listen to what it means for him to be in charge. And from that moment, I began to pay attention to all the ways that I’d made my life – my faith, my vocation, my work, my relationships – so that everything revolved around anything but Jesus. And as I recentered my life, as I made Jesus my journey-mate rather than a regular stop along the way, the paths before me became overwhelmingly more complete.

A passage to transform your journey. As we consider our individual and collective lives, a common thread binds us together: the broken, forgotten, rediscovered, and redeemed roads we all travel. My story, your story, Pastora’s story, God’s story – they all become our story, if we let them. If we allow the stops along the way to settle in and shape us while Jesus participates in the journey with us. If we allow him to transform us through the “movement” of our lives. Recognizing this bond is what defines a life that is not just “lived well” but one in which we learn something as we travel along the path and are faithfully formed by the journey as a whole.

Jesus’ Beatitudes in Matthew 5 are more than just poetic verse used to begin the Sermon on the Mount. They are the essence of his message from beginning to end. Here is a portion of the biblical passage: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted. Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled. …” (Matthew 5:3-6).

These familiar, simple words establish the overall tone of Jesus’s teaching ministry and provide an intimate look at his most deeply held values. The Beatitudes are a road map for growing and learning each step of the way. They provide a clear look at what Jesus believed as he began his ministry on earth because his very humanity was formed around these truths. You see, when Jesus said something, he not only meant it but also lived it. To hear him speak these words was to know his heart. The Beatitudes echoed throughout his ministry, providing us a glimpse of God’s view of the world through his Son.

It seems as if bookstore shelves and online book websites are filled with titles that promise a better business, better health, better relationships, and a better life overall. Program after program, technique after technique has come and gone – some with wild success, others completely forgettable. But these modern-day solutions, with all their good intentions and advice, are man-made and man-promoted. They are new ideas to fix old problems – the very problems that Jesus addressed more than two thousand years ago when he provided the answers that people today spend thousands of dollars seeking out.

It is through the Beatitudes, a term that literally means “blessings,” that Jesus gives us a new definition of significance before poetically leading us to reflect on the deeper meaning of life, our relationship with God, and the interconnections we have with each other. Jesus never intended the Beatitudes to serve only as road markers of lives lived well. He meant them to serve as vehicles by which we experience the very best life. 

Shane Stanford is President and CEO of The Moore-West Center for Applied Theology and JourneyWise. This essay is adapted from his book JourneyWise: Redeeming the Broken & Winding Roads We Travel (Whitaker House 2023). Reprinted by permission. Photo By Jeremy Perkins (Pexels).