This week on the summer series finale, Brandon sits down with Reverend Dr. Steve Fountain, pastor of the Largs Church of the Nazarene on the west coast of Scotland, for a conversation about the Camino de Santiago and what a 200-mile pilgrimage teaches us about walking with God.
Steve is a country boy from the American South whose winding road led through Trevecca, a PhD at the University of Glasgow, a career in medical communications, a charity with his wife Tasha, and finally a call to ministry in Scotland. In this episode he shares how he and Tasha took on the Camino Primitivo, the original and hardest route from Oviedo to Santiago, through a 95-degree heat wave, mountain climbs, and an eighteen-pound pack.
But the Camino was never really about the finish line. Steve talks about carrying a homemade journal full of prayer requests from their church and literally bearing other people’s burdens mile after mile, leaving them on rocks at shrines along the way. He reflects on meeting fellow pilgrims and the strange trust that builds with strangers, the locals who welcomed two tired pilgrims into a Wednesday evening service they stumbled into by accident, and the realization that the moments along the journey mattered far more than the arrival in Santiago.
He brings it all home with a simple pilgrim lesson for those of us who can’t walk 200 miles: simplify your day to just getting from here to here, carry as little as possible, leave behind what you don’t need, and don’t rush past the moments that actually mean the most. It’s a conversation about bodies, burdens, and what it means to actually walk with God rather than just talk about it.
