Robert Louis Stevenson loved to travel on foot with none but a pack-animal for company. If you haven't read any of his works the following excerpts from some of his works will serve to wet your appetite. 

"For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go.

I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move; to feel the needs and hitches of our life more nearly; to come down off this feather-bed of civilization, and find the globe granite under foot and strewn with cutting flints. Alas, as we get up in life, and are more preoccupied with our affairs, even a holiday is a thing that must be worked for. To hold a pack upon a pack-saddle against a gale out of the freezing north is no high industry, but it is one that serves to occupy and compose the mind. And when the present is so exacting who can annoy himself about the future."

"I began my little pilgrimage in the most enviable of all humours: that in which a person, with a sufficiency of money and a knapsack, turns his back on a town and walks forward into a country of which he knows only by the vague report of others. Such an one has not surrendered his will and contracted for the next hundred miles, like a man on a railway. He may change his mind at every finger-post, and, where ways meet, follow vague preferences freely and go the low road or the high, choose the shadow or the sunshine, suffer himself to be tempted by the lane that turns immediately into the woods, or the broad road that lies open before him into the distance, and show him the far-off spires of some city, or a range of mountaintops, or a run of sea, perhaps, along a low horizon. In short, he may gratify his every whim and fancy, without a pang of reposing conscience, or the least jostle of his self-respect. It is true, however, that most men do not possess the faculty of free action, the priceless gift of being able to live for the moment only...."

  "There is nobody under thirty so dead but his heart will stir a little at the sight of a gypsie's camp. 'We are not cotton-spinners all;' or, at least, not all through. There is some life in humanity yet; and youth will now and again find a brave word to say in dispraise of riches, and throw up a situation to go strolling with a knapsack."

  "I have a shelf in my study for tried authors; one in my mind for tried principles; and one in my heart for tried friends." Richard Cecil.

"A library is not a luxury, but one of the necessaries of life. A book is better for weariness than sleep; better for cheerfulness than wine; it is often a better physician than the doctor, a better preacher than the minister, a better sanctuary than a drowsy church." H. W. Beecher

"No good book, or good thing of any sort, shows its best face at first." Carlyle. 

"A habit cannot be tossed out the window, it must be coaxed down the stairs a step at a time." Mark Twain. 

I like this quote, but as a Christian I have seen the Lord miraculously deliver people from the throws of addiction, a life of crime or debauchery, with the preaching of a single sermon, an isolated passage in the Bible or a single conversation with someone. That being said, for every deliverance like that, the majority are "coaxed down the stairs, a step at a time. 
Photo by Jordan Matter

  "The best part of a dinner is the half hour before it." 

Or after. 

Clifford Raymond, painting by Pietro Saltini. 

  "With Christ, as with us all, it was no doubt difficult, so long as he was amid the surroundings of common life, to believe in the stirrings of a divine call within him.

The mystic promptings of the soul, the deep appealing look of men and things, the flash of inspired prayer into the mind, did not agree with the narrow home, the village cares, the synagogue routine: they would start away at the sound of plane and saw; be drowned in the gossip of neighbors; How should the youth suppose, even when the intimations were most full of wonder, that God had really sent for him?" 

  And so it is with us, regardless how powerful or mystical our salvation experience may be, when we are back to our routine among the common things of life, living in a low income house, weighed down by the burden of job demands, and the clamor of the factory's hammer and saw, or the office, filled with obscenities and gossip, and when church has become routine, how easy it is to doubt, even when the Spirit was most full of wonder, that God had really called us.

James Martineau, photo by Mg Lizi. 

  I like the simple truths of Christianity and I often run into those who seek the mystical or the philosophical in search of something higher. The following quote captures eloquently, the way I feel.

 "We don't want to overfly with wings of vain philosophy, beyond the blessed level of Christian simplicity and repose; of quitting the green homesteads of a human and a heartfelt faith for the trackless air of speculation clear and cold, and amid the naked rocks and un-melting snows of the lonely intellect, losing sight of the slopes of Nazareth and the villages of Galilee. The meek purity, the quiet trust, the reverent yet un-fearing spirit of Christ, and with the secret faith, which these imply, are the simple truths of Christianity."

James Martineau, photo from the Internet. 

In Sympathy with the families in Roseburg Oregon, the seventy first school shooting this year........

"After Commandore McDonoug's great victory over the British fleet on Lake Champlain, the commander of the of the British land forces sent to him to inquire the secret of his success. He replied, "Hard fighting." He pushed on the battle, though his ship was riddled with shot, twice on fire and in a sinking condition. He was twice knocked down, and reported killed, but revived and returned to the gun, which he sighted in till the victory was gained."
Now, though our battles are no doubt less, we can learn a measure of courage from McDonoug's spirit. "Fight the good fight."

  "A mother whose children were remarkable examples of early piety, was asked the secret of her success. She answered, "While my children were infants on my lap, as I washed them, I raised my heart to God, that he would wash them in that blood which cleanseth from all sin; as I clothed them in the morning, I asked my Heavenly Father to clothe them with the robe of Christ's righteousness; as I provided them food, I prayed that God would feed them with the bread of heaven, and give them to drink of the water of life. When I have prepared them for the house of God, I have pleaded that their bodies might be fit temples for the Holy Ghost to dwell in. When they left me for the week-day school, I followed their infant footsteps with a prayer, that their path through life might be like that of the just, which shineth more and more unto the perfect day. And so I committed them to the rest of the night, the silent breathing of my soul has been, that their Heavenly Father would take them in his embrace and fold them in his paternal arms." 

Author unknown, photo by Jose A. Gallego.