A few weeks ago, we got a call from a former neighbor. The woman who bought our old house in Red Bank had some air conditioning work done, and the crew found a few things we'd left behind twelve years ago, sealed off in a corner of the attic when we renovated the upstairs. She tracked us down to make sure we got them back.

So the kids and I went to pick up the treasures. To them, the house looked smaller than the one in their memory. To me, it looked exactly the same, and I couldn't stop smiling.

Among the keepsakes, wedding cards, a little jewelry, was one of Jenny's old journals from the earliest days of our dating. My daughter, who's about the age Jenny was when she wrote it, has been devouring it ever since. "It makes her feel more real to me, and she wrote a lot about how much she loved you," she said. My son read a line and decided he wouldn't read anymore.

Jenny and I were talking about some of what she had written, and she laughed and said, "Well, I was clearly obsessed." I told her that we love each other more now than we did then, but even if it had only been a season, there's something wonderful in knowing I have been loved that fully, that certainly, by someone.

I think God's love is like that too, fully and certainly given, except His love is never limited to a season. What we as a community have felt on the mountain, some of us for the first time, wasn't a phase. It's the same love, constant, underneath every other love we've been given, in a marriage, a family, a friendship. Our human loves only ever show us a piece of it.

That's what we're actually doing when we serve a walk. We're not the source of that love. We're the hands and feet carrying it forward, so a pilgrim gets to feel, maybe for the first time, how completely they are loved. Just like a stack of wedding cards and a girl's journal, sealed away for twelve years, could still say something true the moment they were opened again.

Men's Walk #66 is September 24-27, and Women's Walk #79 is October 1-4. If you know someone who would be a qualified pilgrim who could use that kind of love right now, someone who may have forgotten it or never quite believed it, pray about sponsoring them. That journal was a reminder of how deeply I am loved. On the mountain, we get to be that same reminder for someone else.