May 7: National Tourism Day

Since we live in the center of beautiful Minnesota, we maybe understand what "tourism" is more than other parts of the country.  Tourism is when a city or an area feature something special about themselves so that people will come and see and spend money.

In our part of the state, people come to see our beautiful lakes and rivers. Then restaurants and businesses try to get those people to come to town and buy stuff. That's tourism.  Can you think of other tourism things in our area? Here's some ideas:  people come to see our forests, our bike trails, our Paul Bunyan things. People come here to fish and hunt and ski and snowmobile and watch birds.  There are so many cool things where we live, and many people drive lots of hours just to get to where we live.  Sometimes it is easy to forget how beautiful it is around here and how people are drawn here because of its beauty.

The Bible talks about a different kind of tourism.  It doesn't use the word "tourism", but it says that people should be drawn to God because of you. In 2 Corinthians it calls us a "sweet fragrance of Christ". Just like people are drawn to Minnesota because of its beauty, people are drawn to Christ because our beauty (sweet fragrance). I guess that means we are all in the tourism business -- the work of drawing people to us to see the beauty of Christ.  Can you think of some practical ways we can do that??

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