The GSB team is mobile again, as we start a new travel devotional to England with our posthumous guide, the Venerable Bede.
A travel devotional out of season
If you’ve been following for a while, you may note the timing is a bit odd. Although we did our Israel travel devotionals in non-summer months, those were the exception. But our next two travel devotionals will take place in non-traditional travel months.
This travel devotional is more improvised than anything. The Wife has always wanted to go England during the holiday season to visit the Christmas markets. She’s explained to me what they are a few times, and I’m still not sure I fully understand. They sound a lot like a craft fair, and I spent a week one day at one of those.
If you’ve been to a craft fair, or a Christmas market, you probably haven’t seen a lot of guys there. And if you have seen guys there, you haven’t seen them alone. They are there with their girlfriend or wife, and I can assure you, they are performing a selfless act. Christmas markets are not a male activity. I’m even told it doesn’t matter how much hormone therapy males are given when transitioning, they still don’t want to go to Christmas markets.
So, you get the point: The Wife wanted to go, and Ann–who has worn many hats on the GSB team due to her being dehired, or “sacked” as they say in England, multiple times for dereliction of duties during our GSB travels–was going with her. The Wife asked if I wanted to go.
Why the Venerable Bede?
Then I thought of Bede, sometimes called the Venerable Bede, His Bedeness, el Bederino, or just “Bede,” if you’re into the whole brevity thing.
If you’ve not heard of Bede, let’s just say he is to English church history what Eusebius was to early church history, and what Cotton Mather would become to American church history.
Eusebius had his Ecclesiastical History, and Bede had his Ecclesiastical History, and Mather had his Magnalia Christi Americana (“The Great Works of Christ in America”). They all wrote to show how the gospel took hold and converted their country (or in Eusebius’s case, empire) to Christianity. They are not histories of the churches but histories of the Church — Jesus working through His earthly community to turn people back to the Father.
Bede’s Ecclesiastical History covers the history of England from 55 BC (Julius Caesar’s 1st invasion of Britain) to 731 AD (the year Bede completed the work).
I love reading Bede because he gives us his spin on what God is doing in the history Bede’s recounts for us. I will be rereading Bede over the next week, and we will talk about God’s hand in English history, as we visit some of the places Bede wrote about and even visit the place where he (or better, his remains) currently resides.
What you can expect from this travel devotional
If you are new to the GSB travel devotionals, here’s what you can expect.
Each post over the next seven days will talk about the places we visit and how they relate to the expansion of the kingdom of God on earth. As I like to say, we mine the Christian history out of the places we visit. Then I will, Lord willing, transform those experiences into a devotional, rooted in the word of God.
So, in the 5-7 minutes it takes you to read the post each day, you will get to escape a little, laugh a little, and read a little from the Bible. Hence, “a travel devotional.” Consider it a like a Pop Tart — mostly sweet, with a lot of saturated fat, but some nutritional value in there somewhere.
