Tag: Table Rock Lake

London — Where History Still Breathes

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Big Ben taken by Jimmie Aaron Kepler

World’s most memorable destinations that I’ve visited

The first step in a grand passage through some of the world’s most memorable destinations that I’ve visited begins in a city that feels both deeply known and forever new.

London

Every great journey needs a fitting beginning, and for me this one begins in London.

There are cities that make a strong first impression, and then there are cities that seem to reach out from somewhere deeper, as if you have been moving toward them for years without fully knowing it. London has always felt that way to me. It is a city of grandeur, yes, but never the loud or showy kind. Its beauty is steadier than that. It rests in old stone, river light, Gothic towers, quiet parks, red double-decker buses, and the unhurried confidence of a place that has nothing left to prove.

London is the capital of the United Kingdom, the official name of the country, but those are only the facts of it. Facts tell you where a city sits on a map. They do not explain how it settles into the imagination.

What struck me most about London the first time I arrived in its heart was the strong and curious sense that I already knew it. Not completely, of course, and not in the way one knows a hometown or a street where one has lived. But I knew its mood. I knew something of its silhouette, its weather, its voice. I had met London long before I ever laid eyes on it. I had met it in books, in films, in history, in speeches from darker hours of the twentieth century, in old newsreels, and in stories that have shaped so much of the English-speaking world.

Literatures Impact on My Knowing London

Both as a child and in my adult reading life, London kept appearing. Sometimes it stood at the center of the story. Sometimes it appeared only for a chapter, a train platform, a street corner, a fogbound pursuit, or a scene that stayed with me long after the book was closed. The same has been true in film. Again and again, London has shown up not just as a backdrop, but as a living presence. 

London is one of those rare cities a reader can feel he already knows before ever setting foot there, and a good part of that comes from the writers who have walked us through it for years. 

Dickens gave us the London of Oliver Twist, Great Expectations, Bleak House, and Our Mutual Friend, full of fog, crowds, hardship, and human striving. 

Doyle gave us the gaslit streets and rooms of Sherlock Holmes, where Baker Street became as real in the imagination as any address on a map. 

Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray and his elegant plays opened the doors to another London altogether, polished and witty on the surface, but often hiding darker truths underneath. 

Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde gave the city a haunted double life, while Stoker’s Dracula let London become the stage where old-world evil met the modern age. 

Ian Fleming made London part of the machinery of danger and intrigue in the James Bond novels, where clubs, offices, streets, and shadows all seemed to carry the scent of espionage. 

The residence on the left is where the late Sir Sean Connery, the first James Bond lived. In the below photo you can see the front entrance of the residence of his real life neighbor, Sir Roger Moore, who also played the part of James Bond. He lived in the white residence. Their front doors were around the corner from each other. Interestingly, across the street from Connery’s from door entrance was the grounds of Buckingham Palace.

Pictures of Sean Connery and Roger Moore’s homes in London

And J.K Rowling, through the Harry Potter series, made London magical in a new way, turning King’s Cross, hidden alleys, and secret doorways into places readers would forever look at differently. 

Taken together, these writers do something special: they make London feel less like a distant destination and more like a place we have already lived in through story, long before we ever arrive. I had already stood in its drawing rooms, crossed its bridges, entered its stations, and followed its shadows. By the time I finally came to London in person, it felt less like discovering a stranger and more like meeting, at last, a place I had known from a distance all my life.

London Feels Familiar

That may be one of London’s rarest gifts. It feels familiar even when it is new.

The city carries its history with remarkable ease. Westminster gathers together monarchy, Parliament, endurance, and national memory in one sweep of the eye. The Thames moves through the middle of the city with calm authority, as if it has watched the whole long story unfold and still intends to keep its own counsel. Big Ben, Westminster Abbey, Buckingham Palace, the old facades and spires and bridges—these are not merely landmarks. They are part of a living conversation between the past and the present.

And yet London never feels trapped in history. That is one of the things I admire most about it.

Live in Present Tense

For all its pageantry and weight, London lives very much in the present tense. The cafés hum with conversation. The bookstores offer refuge and invitation. The West End glows toward evening with its old theatrical magic still very much intact.

During my last stay, my hotel was in the West End which can be considered the Broadway of London.

The parks give the city room to breathe. Even the weather, with its drifting rain and silver light, seems woven into the character of the place. And the traffic—Lord bless it—moves with a stubborn, relentless determination that may be as revealing as any monument.

Look up, to linger, to notice the details

Walking through London, I found myself slowing down. Not only because a city like that deserves your attention, but because it quietly asks for it. London does not shout. It does not need to. It invites you to look up, to linger, to notice the details—a clock tower against the morning sky, the worn dignity of old stone, the movement of the river, the sudden stillness in the middle of a busy square. It is a city best received at more than a glance.

For a traveler, that makes London unforgettable. For a writer, it makes London dangerous in the very best way. It stirs the desire to take one more walk, fill one more notebook page, sit one hour longer in a café, and follow one more street just to see what waits at the end of it.

I have now been to London three official times, and each visit has met me with a slightly different mood. That is the nature of great places, I suspect. They do not stay fixed because we do not stay fixed. We arrive older, more observant, more grateful, more burdened, more hopeful, and the city seems to answer the person we are when we meet it. Yet every time I have visited London, one truth has remained the same.

History there is not dead.

It is not locked away behind museum glass or confined to plaques and guidebooks. In London, history still breathes. It moves through the streets, lingers in the architecture, rises in the bells, drifts along the river, and waits in the spaces between old stones and modern lives.

And if you slow down enough, you can hear it.

This is where the journey begins.

The picture of Big Ben was taken by me in October 2025. I also took the picture of the former residences of Sir Sean Connery and Sir Roger Moore.

Grace and Peace,
Jimmie Aaron Kepler

Across Oceans, Old Stones, and Quiet Harbors

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The Journey Behind the Journey

The organ is 550 years old at St Mary’s Church in Lubeck, Germany. In 1705 Johann Sebastian Bach came to Lübeck to hear the music and study under master organist Dietrich Buxtehude. Photo by Jimmie Aaron Kepler, taken in Lübeck Germany, October 2025.

There are some trips that do little more than stamp a passport and give you something pleasant to talk about over supper or over coffee with friends. Then there are the other kind, the ones that settle somewhere deeper down, in that inward country where memory, gratitude, and wonder all seem to live side by side. These journeys over the past five years turned out to be one of those.

Destinations

What first looked like a list of destinations on a map slowly became something else altogether. It became a gathering of moments stretched across oceans and years. It carried me over the Pacific and the Atlantic, across the Tasman Sea, the Caribbean, the North Sea, the Baltic, and even the old blue waters of the Mediterranean. It took me from island shores in Hawaii, Tahiti, and Samoa to the Caribbean islands, and onward to the Azores, Madeira, Mallorca, and Mo’orea, each place bringing its own weather, its own light, and its own way of lodging itself in the heart. It carried me through cities like London, Paris, Edinburgh, Belfast, Bergen, Copenhagen, Amsterdam, Gibraltar, Barcelona, Sydney, Auckland, Papeete, Hamburg, and Lübeck, places where the streets themselves seemed to remember what generations before had built, prayed, endured, and hoped.

Along the way there were old cities worn smooth by time, and weathered harbors where the salt air seemed to drift in carrying stories of sailors, merchants, wars, departures, and homecomings. There were quiet afternoons inside ancient cathedrals where the sunlight came soft through stained glass and laid itself across stone floors that had known the footsteps of centuries. There were island mornings washed in turquoise and gold. There were streets where history did not seem trapped behind museum glass, but alive and nearby, as if it had decided to stroll alongside you for a while and keep you company.

Churches

And nearly everywhere I went, I saw churches.

Sometimes it was a grand cathedral rising over the city square, its bells marking the hour and its spire pointing heavenward as if to remind everybody below there is something higher than commerce, traffic, or politics. Sometimes it was a small stone church tucked along a side street, plain and weathered and faithful in its own quiet way. Sometimes it was a chapel by the sea, or an old parish church standing watch over a village, or a sanctuary open in the middle of the day where a traveler could step inside, sit in silence, and feel the hush settle over him.

In city after city, island after island, there was evidence of God’s presence.

Not always in loud ways. Not always in ways that would make a headline. But there it was all the same. In the old cathedrals built by hands long gone to glory. In candles flickering before prayer altars. In carved stone crosses worn smooth by time. In sacred music drifting faintly through old naves. In the faces of strangers showing kindness. In the beauty of morning light on water. In the deep human longing that built churches in the first place and still draws people through their doors.

That may be one of the things that stayed with me most. No matter the country, no matter the language, no matter the style of architecture or the shape of the harbor, I kept finding reminders that human beings everywhere have reached toward God. They have built sanctuaries. They have prayed under vaulted ceilings and plain wooden roofs. They have lifted hymns in cities and villages and on islands far out to sea. The settings changed. The languages changed. The weather certainly changed. But the witness remained.

Every place had a voice of its own.
Some whispered.
Some sang.
Some simply stood there, quiet and sure of themselves, and let beauty do the talking.

Twenty-five Countries and Counting

Since April of 2022, I have traveled to twenty-five countries. I have not made that journey alone. Along the way I have had company from my walking stick—my cane, actually—named Virgil, as in Virgil Cane. My fiancée, she who cannot be named on the internet and who has no online presence at all, has shared much of the road with me. Friends from my writer’s group have also traveled alongside me from time to time, helping carry the laughter, the weariness, the wonder, and the occasional confusion that always seems to come with trying to find your way in a place where even the street signs look like they belong to somebody else’s story.

Travel, at least the kind worth remembering, has a way of humbling a person. It reminds you that the world is both far larger and far more intimate than you imagined. You can stand in a cathedral half a world away and feel something familiar stir in your chest. You can sit by a harbor in another country and watch the water move against old stone, and know deep down that human beings have always been longing, leaving, loving, grieving, building, and hoping. The scenery changes. The heart does not all that much.

That may be one reason I have loved these journeys as much as I have. They have shown me beauty, yes, but they have also shown me continuity. The world is wide, but there are threads that run through it all. Hospitality. Reverence. Memory. Music. Bread on a table. Light on water. The hush inside a church. The laughter of strangers. The sense, now and then, that you have stepped into a place that was waiting to tell you something if only you would slow down enough to listen.

And slowing down has been part of the lesson.

A cane will teach you that. Age will too. Travel has a way of reminding you that not every journey is meant to be rushed through as if you were checking items off a list. Some places ask for lingering. Some call for sitting still. Some deserve more than a photograph and a hurried sentence in a notebook. Some deserve your full attention.

That is what this series is about.

What follows is the story of that journey, told through the destinations that have stayed with me the most. I have ranked them not by cost or popularity, not by travel-brochure promises or online trends, but by memory, feeling, and by that harder-to-define quality of whether a place settled into my soul and decided to stay there.

These are the places that have lingered.

These are the old stones, the quiet harbors, the island mornings, the church bells, the cathedrals, and the city streets I still carry with me.

This is the journey behind the journey. I’ll be sharing the wonders of where I’ve visited in the weeks ahead.

Grace and Peace
Jimmie Aaron Kepler

Did you enjoy this article? You can find more of Jimmie Aaron Kepler’s non-fiction books at NONFICTION and his speculative fiction books written as Jim Kepler at FICTION.

Today, Yes, This One

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Morning By The Window

I had planned to meet God on the balcony this morning. Instead, I met Him at the window.

That is how this Friday began for me here in Branson, Missouri. Most mornings on this trip, I have stepped out onto the condo balcony with a cup of Earl Grey tea, my Bible, and my journal, looking out over Table Rock Lake before turning to my writing. It has become a sweet little rhythm. It’s been quiet, steady, and good for the soul. The kind of beginning that helps a man gather his thoughts and offer them to the Lord before the day starts making its demands.

But this morning would not be that kind of morning.

A cold front had moved in overnight. Before daylight had fully broken, I could already tell the whole character of the day had changed. The wind was up. The trees were restless. The lake had lost its calm. What had felt welcoming on the past few mornings now felt raw and sharp. The wind chill had dropped into the mid 40s, and instead of stepping out into the dawn, I stayed inside and stood at the balcony window, warm cup in hand, looking out at a darker, colder, more unsettled world.

And maybe that is what caught my attention most. The day I thought I was getting was not the day that came.

The Weather Changed

The last several mornings had been mild and pleasant. Cool enough to feel fresh, but not so cold as to send a fellow scurrying back indoors. The air had that clean Ozarks touch to it. The lake had looked gentle. The hills had seemed half asleep. Those mornings invited lingering.

This one did not.

This morning was dark in a different way. Not soft-dark. Not still-dark. It was a restless dark. The wind worked over the surface of Table Rock Lake until the water looked troubled. The trees along the shore bent and shifted as if the whole landscape had been stirred from sleep too roughly.

It looked, I suppose, a little like life does sometimes.

There are days that arrive warm and welcoming, and there are days that come in with a hard edge to them. Days when the spirit feels stirred up before breakfast. Days when the heart is already carrying something heavy. Days when the weather outside seems to match the weather within.

I stood there looking through the glass and thought to myself: this was not the morning I had planned.

But of course, that is often the way life goes. We make our little arrangements. We set our expectations. We imagine what the day ought to feel like. And then the Lord allows a different sort of morning to arrive.

The Verse That Met Me

It was right there, with the wind moving over the water, that Psalm 118:24 came to me:

“This is the day which the LORD hath made; we will rejoice and be glad in it.”

I have known that verse for a long, long time. It is familiar enough that a person can quote it without really stopping to hear it. But this morning it landed with fresh weight.

Because the verse does not say, “This is the easy day.”
It does not say, “This is the warm day.”
It does not say, “This is the bright and cheerful day when everything falls neatly into place.”

It says, “This is the day.”

This one.

The windy one.
The darker one.
The one that did not match my plans.
The one I might not have chosen for myself.

This day.

That is what makes the verse so strong and so tender at the same time. It reminds me that my peace is not to be anchored in the kind of day I wish I had received, but in the God who made the day I have been given.

Psalm 118 is a song of thanksgiving, but it is not shallow thanksgiving. It rises out of mercy, deliverance, and trouble overcome by the goodness of God. It has some backbone to it. It knows what it is to praise the Lord not only when the skies are clear, but when the heart has learned that God is faithful in every weather.

And that is what I needed this morning.

The Gift of This Day

Standing there at the window, I was reminded that before I had one thought about this Friday, God had already made it. Before I spoke my first prayer, He was already Lord over every hour of it. Before I wrote one line in my journal or one word for the page, the whole day was already resting in His hands.

That steadies a man.

The older I get, the more I think one of the great disciplines of the Christian life is learning to receive the day God sends instead of pining for a different one. That does not come naturally. We are forever looking backward with regret or forward with worry. We rehearse old sorrows. We borrow tomorrow’s burdens. All the while, the Lord keeps calling us back to the ground beneath our feet.

This is the day.

Not yesterday.
Not tomorrow.
This day.

The one in front of you.
The one in your hands.
The one under God’s rule and care.

And if that is true, then even a cold, windblown Friday morning can be received with gratitude.

Thank You, Lord, For One More Day

Let me say it plainly: rejoicing does not always look triumphant. Sometimes it is not a shout. Sometimes it is not a song. Sometimes it is simply opening your Bible when your heart feels tired. Sometimes it is taking hold of your coffee cup or tea mug, looking out at a day you did not expect, and whispering, “Thank You, Lord, for one more day.”

That too is rejoicing.

Maybe that is the mercy hidden in mornings like this. We do not have to find God only in the lovely moments. We do not have to wait for better weather, brighter light, or easier circumstances. He meets us in the day we have, not only in the day we would have chosen.

So this Friday morning, wherever you are and whatever sort of weather has found your soul, receive the day from His hand.

Not yesterday.
Not tomorrow.
Today.

And rejoice.

Love and Grace,
Jimmie Aaron Kepler

Did you enjoy this article? You can find more of Jimmie Aaron Kepler’s non-fiction books at NONFICTION and his speculative fiction books written as Jim Kepler at FICTION.