The Journey to God
The journey to God is not a race between the righteous and the fallen. If Christianity begins anywhere, it begins with the more difficult recognition that both capacities live within us: the capacity to harm and to heal, to harden and to repent, to place ourselves above another person and to kneel beside them.
To be with God is therefore not to declare ourselves pure. It is to remain answerable. The person who believes they are beyond sin may stop examining themselves; the person who believes they are nothing but sin may stop believing they can return. Faith asks us to refuse both forms of finality.
Christian tradition speaks of the image of God — imago Dei — carried by human beings. I do not understand that image as proof that we are already what we should be. I understand it as a dignity that can be obscured without being easily erased: the capacity to recognise love, mercy, truth, courage and the worth of another life even after we have failed to live them perfectly.
This is why the road matters more to me than the pedestal. Christ repeatedly turns toward people who have been judged, ignored or reduced to what they have done. He eats with those others avoid. He kneels to wash feet. In the story of the prodigal son, the father does not wait at the doorway with a ledger; he runs down the road before the son can earn his way home.
Grace changes the journey because it means return is not only an achievement of will. We still choose, repair, apologise, forgive and try again. But the road home is not created by our perfection. Grace is the possibility that the road remains open even after we have walked in the wrong direction.
Holding on to God does not always mean holding on to a strong feeling of God. Feelings change. Certainty rises and falls. There are seasons when faith feels close and seasons when it feels like walking a road after dark with no landmark except the next step. Sometimes faith is simply choosing not to abandon love because love has become difficult.
That may mean telling the truth when a lie would protect our pride. It may mean refusing revenge when hurt is asking to reproduce itself. It may mean remaining beside someone whose suffering we cannot fix. It may mean accepting forgiveness when shame would rather keep punishing us because punishment feels more controllable than grace.
In my own family, forgiveness has rarely arrived as a declaration. Disappointment and rejection moved in both directions, and I cannot point to one conversation where everything was named, apologised for and settled. Somehow we kept coming back. We sat together, ate, laughed, celebrated and had good times without making every gathering reopen the worst years.
I do not think that means nothing happened, and I would not make silence a rule for healing. But in our case, something was being forgiven before we had language for forgiveness. We strove forward. The past remained part of the road, but it stopped being the only place we could meet. Sometimes grace may look less like a perfect reconciliation and more like finding ourselves at the same table again, still capable of love.
Our way of returning is not a rule for anybody else. Some harms need to be named plainly before relationship can continue. Some relationships become safer through distance rather than reunion. A shared table can be grace; it can also become avoidance if silence is demanded from the person who was hurt. Love is not proved by remaining close at any cost.
We cannot know the whole road another person has walked by looking at where they are today. Someone who appears stubborn may be protecting an old wound. Someone who keeps falling may already have risen more times than we know. Someone whose faith looks unlike ours may have travelled through suffering that changed the language in which they can approach God.
Truth still matters. Compassion is not the refusal to name harm. Forgiveness is not permission for abuse to continue. Boundaries can be acts of love. But truth without love can become another form of violence, especially when certainty turns another human being into an object lesson for our own righteousness.
The journey toward God should make us less interested in standing above another person and more willing to walk beside them. Christianity gives us no shortage of images for this: feet washed instead of ranked, burdens carried instead of mocked, strangers treated as neighbours, the condemned met with mercy, the lost sought rather than discarded.
This does not mean every voice we call God is God. Human beings can mistake desire, fear, pride, group loyalty and certainty for divine authority. A belief can use sacred language and still produce cruelty. Perhaps one test is what the meaning asks us to become: more loving without becoming boundaryless, more humble without becoming voiceless, more truthful without becoming cruel, more connected without demanding that everyone believe exactly as we do.
Repentance, then, is not merely punishment for having taken the wrong road. It is the grace of being able to turn around. The possibility of repentance means no failure needs to become a final address.
Perhaps eternity is not only endless time. Perhaps it is endless depth: more love to learn, more pride to surrender, more mercy to receive, more truth to face, more ways of discovering that God cannot be reached by leaving humanity behind.
Find the image of God — not as a badge of superiority, but as the part of you still capable of answering love with love.
Hold on to it when the road is clear. Hold on to it when the road disappears beneath your feet.
And do not hold it only for yourself. Let it make you slower to condemn, quicker to listen, braver in repair and more willing to make room for another person’s return.
The journey to God is not about arriving before somebody else. It is about learning, again and again, to stop leaving people behind.
And whenever we lose the road, grace gives us the oldest direction it knows:
Turn again.
