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A guide for the journey: Pilgrim’s Progress

Lynne Baab • Tuesday November 11 2025

Liz vividly remembers the summer she was 21. She worked full-time as a youth intern at a church in Los Angeles. She, along with the three other interns and the youth pastor, spent an hour, four mornings a week, studying Pilgrim’s Progress. She found that study transformative in several ways, and she still draws on some of the lessons of that summer.

The full title of the book is The Pilgrim's Progress from This World, to That Which Is to Come. John Bunyan, an English preacher, wrote the book in 1678. It has been translated into more than 200 languages and has...

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Journey and God’s song in the house of our pilgrimage

Lynne Baab • Thursday August 21 2025

When we moved to New Zealand in 2007 for me to take a job as a lecturer at the University of Otago, a friend gave me a card with her beautiful calligraphy of Psalm 119:54: “Your decrees are the theme of my song wherever I lodge” (NIV). I kept that card and used it as a bookmark for many years in New Zealand. I wanted to sing God’s song in that amazing and distant place where God had called me.

Three weeks ago, when I did a search for the word “pilgrimage” in the Bible, I found that same verse in a...

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Journey and pilgrimage

Lynne Baab • Tuesday August 12 2025

I’ve been pondering the relationship between five words: travel, trip, journey, vacation, and pilgrimage. I looked for synonyms for these words online, and the other words often appeared as synonyms, so the overlap between these words is substantial. To me, however, they don’t feel identical. I’ll give you definitions that I got from online dictionaries. Several of these words can be used as verbs or nouns, making their connections more complex. See what you think about how these words relate.

Travel - go from one place to another, typically over a distance of some length. Trip - an act of going to a...

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Journey in the Bible

Lynne Baab • Tuesday August 5 2025

Human beings move around. A LOT. Archaeologists have recently begun to use DNA analysis to discover the vast extent of human migration long before historical records. The tower of Babel story, set in what is now southern Iraq, gives one early picture: “So the Lord scattered them from there over all the earth” (Genesis 11:8; read the whole incident here).

An amazing number of stories in the Bible involve journeys. A small sampling includes:

God saying to Abram, “Go from your country, your people and your father’s household to the land I will show you” (Genesis 12:1). Joseph being forced to go to Egypt after being sold by...

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