Traveling helps us learn we're more alike than different

I realize it is a privilege to travel. When I was growing up, my family did not travel very often. We would go to the beach every summer for a week with my grandparents, but apart from that, our trips were from Columbia to Savannah to visit my father's parents. I had a great-aunt who was like a grandmother to me. She never was married and never drove a car, but in her retirement from teaching, she traveled the world.

I would anxiously await her return from her trips because I knew she would bring me something special, something exotic. She would share pictures from her journeys, and the accounts of her travels would have made anyone want to hit the road. Instead of taking pictures, she would buy slides. I inherited her slide collection, but I don't have a slide projector. I hold them up to the light and see images of the places she found inspiring.

I traveled abroad for the first time when I was in graduate school. Our group from my seminary went to Central America to experience three different cultures and to learn from the people who called Nicaragua, Guatemala and Costa Rica home. We were warmly received; everyone we encountered was eager to share the things they loved. Nicaragua and Guatemala were coming out of a decade-long civil war that had left their countries in ruins.

Over the last seven years, I have been fortunate enough to take three pilgrimages to the Holy Land, visiting Jordan and Israel. These tours were religious pilgrimages to the sites we consider holy. We also met families whose lives have been affected by centuries of conflict, we ate dinner in their homes, and we participated in their traditional dances.

When you travel, you are given the opportunity to see how vast our world is. You have the opportunity to see beautiful buildings and explore galleries filled with priceless artwork. You can sample local foods and visit national parks of other countries. But once again, at least for me, the most overwhelming and inspiring part of traveling is learning despite our differences of language or religious practice or cultural traditions, we are more alike than we are different.

We, as human beings, tend to focus and often obsess over our differences, rather than seeing ways to build or rebuild community.

What would the world be like if we could put aside some of our differences and devote our energy and effort to finding out what we have in common? What would our world look like if we didn't make assumptions about other people before we even have the chance to sit and share a cup of coffee or tea? What would our world look like if we spent a little more time and a little more energy loving our neighbors as we love ourselves? I am going to keep traveling for as long as I can, and hopefully the world will continue to shrink and peace will be the rule rather than the exception. We all can hope, can't we?

Stewart Rawson is the pastor of First Presbyterian Church in Downtown Sumter.