Even though I have lived in many places in the world and have visited many more, I have not been to so many places as might be imagined for someone who has travelled regularly. In my travels I  return to the same places again and again. Last year, during my study leave in Switzerland we explored some new sights, but we also went back to the places we had enjoyed when living there for 2½ years last decade. The Giessbach Falls are a place we always come back to. There are family photos across the years with the distinctive hotel in the background. We also had to visit the house my uncle now lives in, and which we had also lived in for some weeks in 2016, and which I frequently visited as a child, when it belonged to my great-aunts. We showed friends from Spain some of the sights we knew, such as the expansive view over the biggest glacier of the Alps, which unfortunately is shrinking continuously. It was here that years earlier my daughter had walked in the mountains for the first time at less than two years old with a rope tied to her for safety.

Here in New Zealand I enjoy visiting Wellington and Dunedin, where I spent many years, or to walk the land of my parents’ former properties near Timaru, now owned by my siblings. I remember the many hours walking across paddocks thistle grubbing. As a family we have regularly returned to the same holiday house in the mountains. I also return to the tracks and huts, which I have liked over the years. My wife likes to return to the large town she grew up in.

Of course, we sometimes go to places we have never been, walk tracks we have never walked before, but it is always good to see familiar places again.

I think part of this urge to return again and again to the same places is due to our human limitations of time and space. We can only be in one place at any one time. And yet, there are many places that have left a mark on us, many places we could even call home. By returning to those places we participate in the life of those places, even when much of the time we can’t be there. Many Kiwis do that by having a bach, which is their home away from home, the place where they live part of the time. Here they can be in a familiar place that is a little more relaxed and has some more natural beauty. Others have a tradition of the annual trip to a special place, where they may even eat at the same café every time they go there.

As we go to these familiar places, we see what remains the same, but also what has changed. Through that we remain connected with those places. It is notable how even in our very electronic world that is shaped so much by the virtual, real places remain important to us. Humans are grounded. I think that is something good, something we can be thankful for. Our faith is not something to escape from the places we are in, but rather it enables us to find something deeper in our lives here on earth, to give us meaning and purpose. Even the most beautiful place cannot give us that rest in God, but it sure can give us an appreciation of God’s goodness and lead us to thankfulness.