I started the day with the Waltham Forest YFC team at their morning prayer meeting. I used the journey on the Emmaus Road from Luke 24 to help us to think about where we may not be noticing Jesus in our lives. I have a current theme from God to share – that we are so busy rushing from A to B that we do not notice what happens on the journey. The journey just becomes something we use to arrive.

It strikes me massively that Jesus meets these 2 disciples on their journey to Emmaus. They are in the middle of nowhere when Jesus turns up. They are not at the start and neither have they completed the journey when Jesus arrives. It is in the journey itself that they encounter Jesus but fail to recognise him.

At the end of the story the disciples make an interesting remark:

‘Weren’t our hearts strangely warmed when he walked with us and explained the scriptures’

The clues were there for the disciples. Their bodies were giving them the clues, but they were failing to register them. They were experiencing something of God, but due to their grief they were refusing to listen to what that something may be.

Reading that passage causes me to ask

what is it that prevents me from noticing when Jesus is so clearly there?

It seems to me that it is easy to miss Jesus in the journey.
It is easy to be so keen to reach the goal, the destination or the aim and miss Jesus traveling alongside us.

When that happens we are truly missing a life changing encounter, and the richness of the road is lost to nowhere.