Wanderlust

Trickling over rocks, a stream of water flowed past me behind a small Greek Orthodox Church in Philippi, Greece. The only sounds were the steady flow of water and an occasional bird rustling in the trees. I placed my bag and camera on the stone steps alongside the small river and slipped off my brown ballet flats. As I sat down, I submerged my feet into the river water – the same river and the same water that baptized Lydia, a purple dye merchant from Thyatira and the first converted European Christian, nearly 2,000 years prior. The water was colder than I was expecting – even for a cloudy April day – and I pulled my feet out rather quickly.

I sat quietly for a moment and was taken back to the day of my own baptism in South Georgia, some 5,500 miles and 15 years away from that moment. It wasn’t in a river and the water surely wasn’t as cold, but I, like Lydia, chose to be baptized. I began to wonder how I ended up there, sitting next to a river in northern Greece, imagining a woman, probably not much older than I, and myself practicing the same ritual and sitting next to the same river – though separated by thousands of miles and years.

So how did I end up there, in that moment, contemplating my connection to this place and this woman? Travel.

Travel enables movement, not only in distance, but also through time and through barriers – cultural, political and religious. It unites people in ways not otherwise possible or imaginable. There I sat, a 27 year-old American, submerging my feet into the same waters where Lydia submerged hers thousands of years prior, both of us viewing that water not as just a river, but as a symbol of grace. At that moment alongside a river in Philippi, she and I were united. The world – while vast and immense – isn’t a place of unrelated strangers, each on his or her own journey. Rather the world is a wonderful and amazing community of people who are connected and interwoven, who are more similar than different; and through travel, this interwoven fabric of humanity is most beautifully revealed.