The Long Way There

Not all formation happens in moments that feel spiritual at the time. Some of it happens quietly, stretched across miles, when you don’t yet have language for what’s being carried.

For two years, when I was six and seven, my dad and I spent a lot of time in the car together. Long drives. Hours each way. We’d listen to worship music from the early 2000s, the kind that felt big and hopeful, even if I didn’t understand half of what it was saying yet. Sometimes we’d stop and do something unexpected. Once, we went rafting for the day. I didn’t know why the schedule bent like that. I just knew I got more time with him.

At that age, I wasn’t tracking stress or provision or unanswered questions. I was simply glad to be there. Glad to sit beside my dad. Glad that the drive meant we were together instead of passing each other in the blur of a busy week.

Only much later did I understand what was underneath those trips. That my parents were uncertain. That finances were tight. That my dad was wrestling with God about timing and provision and calling.

What I absorbed then wasn’t doctrine. It was the fact that love shows up even when things are unclear; that faith doesn’t always resolve tension, but it can endure it; that presence is sometimes the most honest form of provision.

The Israelites were carried through the wilderness before they understood the weight of what God was protecting them from (Deuteronomy 1:31, “The LORD your God carried you, as a father carries his son”). The disciples walked with Jesus for years before recognizing who He truly was. Children are brought to the Sabbath, the feasts, the altar, not because they grasp the theology but because instruction and formation begins in faithful presence before comprehension arrives.

As a child, I thought those drives were an adventure. As an adult, I see them as a kind of offering. And as a faint reflection of the way God carries us when we cannot yet see what’s at stake.

Instruction often works like that. We receive meaning long before we can name it. We are shaped by sacrifices we don’t yet see. And later (sometimes much later), we realize that what felt ordinary was actually costly, and what felt effortless was carried for us.

This is part of why drift can feel so disorienting. We were given something real. We saw faith lived, not just spoken. And still, we have to learn how to carry it ourselves. The call is not merely to receive instruction, but to step into it—to become the kind of person who bears the weight for others, who chooses presence even when the outcome is uncertain, who lives faith as a slow and costly embodiment rather than a polished declaration.

Moses tells the next generation to remember what their eyes saw and to teach it to their children (Deuteronomy 4:9). But the remembering requires first having been there, even when you didn’t yet understand. The inheritance we receive must become the life we live. The presence that shaped us must become the presence we offer.

Where were you present before you understood? Who carried weight for you long before you could see it? And what might it look like to honor that inheritance—not by idealizing it, but by choosing presence yourself, now, even when the road is long and the resolution unclear?