Welcome to 10-minute Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life.

In the time it takes to get to work.

I'm Patrick Miller.

An older, wiser friend of mine named Steve Garber is a brilliant thinker and Christian author.

He's also a student of the great American naturalist, John Muir.

He explained to me that Muir didn't believe in hiking.

And to be honest, that kind of surprised me since Muir was famous for hiking and protecting

the Sierra Nevada mountain range.

But my friend, Steve, explained to me that according to Meir, hiking is simply walking

through a place. To hike a spot

is to see it as a destination or a throughway. But from here, nature was something deeper. He said that

we should see every place as God's place, as holy ground, or in the Spanish language, Saint-Holy, aet, a place, saunteray. And so he liked to joke

that he was sauntering because it sounded the same, and he passed through nature, aware of its

saintly, holy, sacred dimension. Now, Mir wasn't a scholar of the English language, but a similar

connection exists there.

The English word saunter comes from the middle English word santran, which means to muse or to be in a reverie.

We tend to imagine someone sauntering is someone coolly and aloofly walking through the world.

But a true saunter is not aloof to its surroundings.

To truly saunter is to pay careful attention to the deep glory in things, to see reflections of God in the flower, in the meadow, the

mountain in the valley, the bluff in the river. To saunter is to realize that the world is thin,

and sometimes the spiritual realm breaks in,

charging every atom with the glory of God.

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