Won’t I be your neighbor?

What does it mean to love your enemy?

I would imagine this is a question you have wrestled with at some point. One of Jesus’ most radical instructions is to love enemies and pray for those who persecute us.

We could intellectualize the question and attack it with other questions. Well, we might ask, who counts as an enemy in an industrialized society? We don’t have rival tribes living nearby anymore. We do, on a global scale, have countries that our leaders tell us are enemies or who we refuse to do business with, or whatever, but these things don’t feel particularly personal to most people.

In middle school and high school I had bullies. They were clear enemies. But those days are long gone. You may have coworkers or bosses who you believe are out to get you or who treat you poorly. Those may be good examples of modern enemies for some. For others, this is merely a nuisance that doesn’t take up that much time or head space.

In recovery circles we often talk about the influence family has on us. And, in many cases, people end up at-odds with their family. It’s hard to think of family members as enemies, even in these circumstances, but this can be the case.

And yet, for me anyway, these examples seem somewhat trivial compared to the word enemy. A word that sounds like it requires a willingness to go to battle in order to justify. For you, this may not be the case. One of the examples above may strike a chord so deeply that “enemy” seems like the only logical word choice.

Either way, I don’t believe it’s necessary that we identify enemies. I’ll say more about this in a bit, but it has something to do with how Jesus answers the question, “Who is my neighbor?”

25 A legal expert stood up to test Jesus. “Teacher,” he said, “what must I do to gain eternal life?” 26Jesus replied, “What is written in the Law? How do you interpret it?” 27He responded, “You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your being, with all your strength, and with all your mind, and love your neighbor as yourself.” 28Jesus said to him, “You have answered correctly. Do this and you will live.”

29But the legal expert wanted to prove that he was right, so he said to Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?”

30Jesus replied, “A man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho. He encountered thieves, who stripped him naked, beat him up, and left him near death. 31Now it just so happened that a priest was also going down the same road. When he saw the injured man, he crossed over to the other side of the road and went on his way. 32Likewise, a Levite came by that spot, saw the injured man, and crossed over to the other side of the road and went on his way. 33A Samaritan, who was on a journey, came to where the man was. But when he saw him, he was moved with compassion. 34The Samaritan went to him and bandaged his wounds, tending them with oil and wine. Then he placed the wounded man on his own donkey, took him to an inn, and took care of him. 35The next day, he took two full days’ worth of wages and gave them to the innkeeper. He said, ‘Take care of him, and when I return, I will pay you back for any additional costs.’ 36What do you think? Which one of these three was a neighbor to the man who encountered thieves?” 37Then the legal expert said, “The one who demonstrated mercy toward him.”

Jesus told him, “Go and do likewise.”

~ Luke 10:25-37, CEB

This story loses a little of its impact for modern readers if we don’t know the history. So, let’s use metaphor to help you understand the dynamic between these characters. Imagine if the samaritan was a black man in the south in the 1950’s and the man in the ditch was a good ole boy. Or imagine if one was a Palestinian and one was an Israeli. Or a Russian and a Ukrainian. Imagine if one of the priests were Methodist, and the next Presbyterian, or Baptist, or whatever. Or maybe a therapist or a social worker.

The point is this: society’s helpers passed the victim by while a man who would otherwise be perceived as an enemy stopped to help.

It’s funny that they ask Jesus, “Who is my neighbor?” Because we know the instructions for neighbor and enemy are the same: love. So, in that way, it doesn’t matter who qualifies as a neighbor or who qualifies as an enemy. The response is the same in either case: Love. This is why I said earlier that I don’t think we need to identify enemies, or even identify neighbors.

No- the question is not, who is my enemy, or who is my neighbor. In fact it’s not a question at all. Jesus calls us to be neighborly to all, regardless of how we might categorize others. Just to hammer this home- the question is not who is my neighbor and who is my enemy, but how do I live as a neighbor to all people? And we get at least a partial answer to that, because Jesus tells us the primary trait of a neighbor is mercy.

This message is more radical today than it was then, because we live in a culture that teaches love your neighbor and burn your enemy and their children at the stake. Not literally- but we do live in a vicious culture. The question for all of us remains, even 2000 years later, how do we make space for the other? The question is not should we do this. But how are we going to make it happen. How are we going to be neighborly.

That’s the question Jesus ultimately answers. Not, who is my neighbor, but what quality should you prioritize if you’re going to live as a neighbor to all.

Jesus’ answer was clear enough: Mercy.

God is big enough to handle our laments

When we think about prayers of lament in the bible that are personal, we find that most of them have similar elements. The structure of these psalms includes: an invocation of God, the complaint, the request for help, an expression of certainty that God will hear and answer the prayer.

Let's start with where we are - if you were going to write a Lament as an individual worshipper crying out to God in time of need, what would you say? What do you weep over? What's your complaint? Your request for help? Do you believe that God will hear and answer your prayer? Psalm 38 is a personal lament prayer:

1-2 Take a deep breath, God; calm down—don’t be so hasty with your punishing rod. Your sharp-pointed arrows of rebuke draw blood; my backside stings from your discipline. 3-4 I’ve lost twenty pounds in two months because of your accusation. My bones are brittle as dry sticks because of my sin. I’m swamped by my bad behavior, collapsed under an avalanche of guilt. 5-8 The cuts in my flesh stink and grow maggots because I’ve lived so badly. And now I’m flat on my face feeling sorry for myself morning to night. All my insides are on fire, my body is a wreck. I’m on my last legs; I’ve had it—my life is a vomit of groans. 9-16 Lord, my longings are sitting in plain sight, my groans an old story to you. My heart’s about to break; I’m a burned-out case. Cataracts blind me to God and good; old friends avoid me like the plague. My cousins never visit, my neighbors stab me in the back. My competitors blacken my name, devoutly they pray for my ruin. But I’m deaf and mute to it all, ears shut, mouth shut. I don’t hear a word they say, don’t speak a word in response. What I do, God, is wait for you, wait for my Lord, my God—you will answer! I wait and pray so they won’t laugh me off, won’t smugly strut off when I stumble. 17-20 I’m on the edge of losing it—the pain in my gut keeps burning. I’m ready to tell my story of failure, I’m no longer smug in my sin. My enemies are alive and in action, a lynch mob after my neck. I give out good and get back evil from God-haters who can’t stand a God-lover. 21-22 Don’t dump me, God; my God, don’t stand me up. Hurry and help me; I want some wide-open space in my life!

~Psalm 38, The Message

When we read this lament, one deemed worthy of consideration seeing as how it is in the scriptures - it is kind of a hot mess. The psalmist suggests that perhaps God needs to calm down - maybe he's gone too far in his discipline? He admits he has behaved badly (but where are the specifics!) and acknowledges that guilt is eating him alive but then he throws out the victim card - his friends don't do enough nice things for him, his cousins don't visit, others betray him. Then he says what we all say, I suspect, when we are in trouble - God, I'm waiting on you! Help me! Almost ready to spill the beans on his own failures, he hesitates as he remembers that he has enemies and even a lynch mob after him. He reports how much good he gives out and what evil he receives in return from God-haters. Surely, God, this must mean we are on the same team!! And then...he asks God to not abandon him, but to help him. Why? He wants some wide-open space in his life. This, my friends, would not pass muster with a sponsor working with someone on their fourth step. (Fourth Step of AA: We made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.) But nevertheless this - it is a lament. It is a crying out. Conflicted, inadequate, confused, ambivalent on so many levels - but a lament all the same.

A pastor in Indiana came before his congregation with a confession last week that struck me as more lament than fourth step. He wanted to express his sorrow over his adultery. He asked for forgiveness. He explained to the congregation how the church by-laws were being followed on the chance he might be restored from that (really old) sin that only happened once (I promise. Trust me.) He admitted that he was really naughty for not confessing this 20 years ago when it happened. The response? The congregation roared their approval. He got a standing O. Those present seemed to find it satisfying, gratifying even, that their pastor - although very human - was coming forth and making things right. They showed him their support. But here's the thing - it was a super messy lament. How do I know? Because another person also came forward - a young woman whose lament was not pre-approved of by the board of deacons. She was unscripted. And she was about to reveal how truly incomplete his apology was.

She and her husband walk forward in a clearly unplanned move and take the mic that Pastor John Lowe II.

Then this happened (very loose translation...but you can google and watch the video yourself if you want the details). The woman said, in essence, "It was 28 years ago, not 20. It was not adultery, you groomed me starting at 14 and did things to my body that no one should have done to them at age 16 on the carpet of a pastor's study. And this went on for years, until I met my husband and he helped me see that I was not bad, but that you were a predator." The crowd hushed. The deacons crept forward on tiny little feet as if to snatch the microphone from her hand. She told of another instance where an associate pastor had been sent off to a different church after abuse allegations were raised. More creeping forward by the deacons. Some in the congregation began to question the pastor, 'Is this true?" The clapping stopped. The young woman looked at her pastor and said, "You are not a victim here." Her husband continued, "I want to return this necklace to the church that was given my wife - I wonder if more of you have a necklace (I am assuming he's NOT buying that this was a 'one time' deal). And I want to return this purity ring - given to her by this pastor while he was having sex with her..."

All of this is recorded on video. Afterwards, the deacons surround their pastor in support. The woman and her husband walk down the aisle alone, with an occasional hand of support reaching out to them. Who knows how the church will respond to both laments.

But most important of all is this true thing - we have a God who hears our laments, even the messy ones.

Here is what Cole Arthur Riley in her book This Here Flesh has to say about how we the people of the church handle lament: "Too often I have heard people's pain met with a Christian consolation which essentially communicates that the person in pain should learn to cling to hope, to trust in God. More often than not, I've found this unhelpful, and at worst a form of spiritual abuse that uses language of hope to manipulate the hurting into a feigned happiness."

No one categorized the confessions of pastor and parishoner a formal lament. But I hope it was - because only God can truly hold the suffering, the complaint, the confession AND the desperate need for help on both a personal and community basis laid bare before this congregation. It was individual, but it was also part of the issue related to belonging too, I think. So I want to say this about personal laments. They may be personal but they are never really private. When one of us suffers, it affects others - sometimes when we don't even know how or why. And those of us who are hearing the laments must stop turning them into object lessons or misguided attempts to confuse a moral inventory with an opportunity to offer forgiveness to show what great Christians we are. Forgiveness and object lessons are not on the table when one laments. Lamenting is a passionate expression of grief or sorrow - and it must be acknowledged without rush to clean it up as a way to avoid deeply seeing the suffering that must be comforted and addressing the wrongs that caused the suffering and must be righted - so that this particular suffering does not happen again on our watch.

I lament over this story. It is such a common story in churches today. I lament for all the ways we keep getting it wrong. I lament that the denomination where I began my faith journey - Southern Baptist - has chosen time and time again to support guys like John Lowe II in a show of blatant preference for helping other sexual abusers stay in their role in the church all the while shaming, ignoring, denigrating, slandering, judging...and more oh so much more...the young, the at-risk, the powerless within their grasp who they abuse. What a disservice we have done to both the abusers - who have had their opportunity to lament stolen from them (because who needs it when you are never held accountable) - and the victims - whose lament has gone unheeded by those who purport to represent God.

More of Cole to help us sort all this out..."Lament is not anti-hope. It's not even a stepping-stone to hope. Lament itself is a form of hope. It's an innate awareness that what is should not be. As if something is written on our hearts that tells us exactly what we are meant for, and whenever confronted with something contrary to this, we experience a crumbling. And in the rubble, we say, God, you promised. We ask, Why? and how could we experience such a devastation if we were not on some mysterious plane, hoping for something different. Our hope can be only as deep as our lament is. And our lament is as deep as our hope. There is a distinction to be made between true lament and the more sinister form of sadness we know as despair. Despair is lament emptied of hope. It is a shell that invites the whole of your soul to swell in its void. Many of us will visit this shell, but despair depends upon our staying. With no framework for healthy lament, I was a prisoner to sadness. "

Where do we go from here? Just a couple thoughts. Consider that virtue and holiness is engraved in our mind, heart, body and soul. That when we lament, when we crumble, it is because part of us knows that GOD PROMISED and that there are things that should not be. People should not be abused anywhere - including the church. No one should be treated with disrespect - including in the church. The world and its inhabitants are worthy of care and attention because they are inherently good, made by God in his image. And we must lament when we see that what God has promised is not yet here. And when things are as they should not be...we must lament. So let us lament - over violence, abuse, neglect, racism, the under-served in our community who need treatment for mental health challenges, poverty, hunger, wars and more. So Much more.

There is more to do - more to consider - but for today, let us lament. Let us ask God to save us, even though we are messy and confused and even a little bit in denial about our limitations...let us lament together.

Grieving is a Gift

Lament - a passionate expression of grief or sorrow

A bit about lamenting in the scriptures...Lament is a major theme in the Bible and particularly in the book of Psalms. To lament is to express deep sorrow, grief, or regret. The psalms of lament are beautiful poems or hymns expressing human struggles and are the largest category of psalms, making up about one third of the entire book of Psalms. These psalms are prayers that lay out a troubling situation to the Lord and make a request for his help.

There are two types of lament psalms: community and individual. There are forty-two individual psalms of lament and sixteen community or national psalms of lament.Community psalms of lament deal with situations of national crisis—they describe problems faced by all the people of God. Psalm 12 is an example of a community lament, expressing sadness over widespread sin:

“Help, Lord, for no one is faithful anymore; those who are loyal have vanished from the human race. Everyone lies to their neighbor; they flatter with their lips but harbor deception in their hearts” (Psalm 12:1–2).

This is an example of a lament we might call upon when belonging is at risk - and boy is belonging at risk in our world today. Now, I want you to stop and breathe for a minute, because by me saying this and reading these verses - tell me if I'm wrong - your mind automatically went to all the ways the world makes you mad or sad, right? So, for the sake of getting things off our chests, what are you lamenting over in terms of community suffering? Sit, breathe and lament for a moment. I want you to bring all the things up into your heart and mind - because if you do, what I talk about next might be healing. How does this make you feel when you think of these things? With that in mind, consider the words of Cole Riley Arthur in her lovely book, This Here Flesh:

"In lament, our task is never to convince someone of the brokenness of this world; it is to convince them of the world's worth in the first place. True lament is not born from that trite sentiment that the world is bad but rather from a deep conviction that it is worthy of goodness."

This completely rewrites the meaning of lament. She goes on to write, "I can only wonder why we have so many depictions of the cross with Christ looking stoic and resolved [and white] and so few with him crying out in pain and abandonment. When I read the story, he does not seem composed; he seems devastated. when we reconstruct a Christ whose very face remains unmoved, how are we to trust that he feels or longs for anything at all? A passionless savior cannot be trusted to save." I wonder if we prefer our Jesus without passion. Why? Because it makes us anxious to think that perhaps, just maybe, God's plan does not include a promise to make us happy. And I have to ask you, can you love a God who has more things on his mind than your happiness? This is a big question. Because it changes the way we approach suffering.

"When God bears witness to our suffering, it is not for his consumption or to demonstrate something. My gramma used to wonder what this all was teaching her, a rhetoric she absorbed from the church. But it seems cruel to believe that God would require grief to make a truth known. I refuse to believe we need to dissect our pain in search of purpose. Sometimes shit is just shit. It's okay to say so. I think when God bears witness to our lament, we discover that we are not calling out to a teacher but inviting God as a nurturer - a mother who hears her child crying in the night. She wakes, rises, and comes to the place where we lie. She rushes her holy warmth against our flesh and says, 'I'm here.' "

Cole Arthur Riley spends the entire book paying tribute to her ancestors, particularly her grandmother and father, for teaching her dignity-affirming spirituality. She challenges us and invites us to learn the lessons that she was taught and is embodying as a black woman academic living in a world that constantly challenges her right to be an intellectual, author, pastor, and spiritual guide living with a chronic unnamed disease that keeps her in constant pain. I need you to hear me. She suffers. And I need you to open your heart here and hear something else: her father was a person with a substance use disorder. There are so many ways that our culture, our own betraying brain, makes up stories that cause us to lament but not heal. I could read her book, as a writer myself, and think: man, that girl is so lucky, she can write a mean sentence without ever knowing that there are many days when she cannot move her legs. Or I could lament over all the wonderful, beautiful lessons that her father taught her and lament, man, I wish my dad had taught me one beautiful lesson of love. Her dad is amazing. Unless she self-discloses, I will know all the good parts of her and never hear about the way she felt when her dad lived in her basement, would OD and she would have to call 911. When she would see him with no teeth, no capacity to do one productive thing per day. It really matters how we think and believe and consider - and there are many more ways to tell your story than you have yet to consider.

The world can be broken and worthy of recognizing its goodness at the same time.

"In lament, our task is never to convince someone of the brokenness of this world; it is to convince them of the world's worth in the first place. True lament is not born from that trite sentiment that the world is bad but rather from a deep conviction that it is worthy of goodness." Cole's daddy is worthy whether or not a portion of his life includes SUD. Cole is worthy whether or not her great grandmother was a slave. The world and its people are worthy of goodness whether or not it feels like it is going to hell in a hand basket and humans continue to disappoint. My friend Yelena went home to Ukraine to bury her mother and ended up having to flee Ukraine mid-mourning when Putin invaded. Her warrior spirit wants to fight back. She wants this unjust, unprovoked war perpetrated on a democratic country with deep loving ties to Russia to end and wants the evil doers punished. But what she is doing is working tirelessly from her home in California, as a US citizen, to provide humanitarian aid to Ukraine and its refugees. This, I think is a sacred lament. We cry at the injustice and then we roll up our sleeves and get to work on behalf of goodness. Not all of us can be Yelena, but all of us can do something to live our conviction that the world is worthy of goodness - and so are you.

The Gift of Belonging

But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people who are God’s own possession. You have become this people so that you may speak of the wonderful acts of the one who called you out of darkness into his amazing light. Once you weren’t a people, but now you are God’s people. Once you hadn’t received mercy, but now you have received mercy.

~1 Peter 2:9-10

This past Sunday we had a conversation on belonging as part of our ongoing series tackling “big” concepts for people of faith. Generally what happens on a given Sunday is I go in prepared with a message, or some ideas that might add up to a message, but I start by asking you all questions. As you respond to those questions I try to weave these ideas into the discussion. Naturally it doesn’t always look like that. Sometimes I am a bit more talk-y than others. And sometimes less. This past week was the latter.

I had a message prepared but, in the context of our conversation in that moment, it wasn’t going to do justice to the moment. I began by asking everyone, “What does belonging mean to you?”

There were a whole host of answers. I’ll try to remember them.

-Belonging is, in part, about feeling accepted.

-Feeling accepted means you can live as you are, without having to hide things or live in shame.

-When you don’t have to live in shame you can show up as your “full self” wherever you go, even in places where you don’t feel like you belong.

-We have to both learn and unlearn what it means to belong. We grow up in families where belonging is conditional, or where we only belong if we follow a very strict set of rules, and this kind of belonging doesn’t translate into other areas of life. And, even worse, that kind of belonging can contribute to a whole host of character defects. Hence, we need to relearn how to belong in ways that are beneficial to ourselves and others.

-Belonging is about support, and people holding us accountable, in positive ways, to how we want to live.

-Belonging is risky. Showing up as your full self does mean living with nothing hidden (or, you know, less hidden than we otherwise would if we were living in shame) and that can be scary. We wrestle with the question, “If I show people who I really am…what will they think?”

-Several people said they felt that all sense of belonging begins with God’s acceptance. When we discover we are loved and accepted by God and that we “belong” to His community we gradually become open to the idea that we might be able to belong in a more general sense. In other words, many of us wrestle with (or have in the past) the belief that we simply don’t belong anywhere, and God changes that and allows us to see ourselves for who we really are.

So, as you can see, what could I possibly add to all that? Quite probably nothing.

In direct response to the passage, someone shared how important it was that we are chosen, not merely accepted. Chosen implies that we are sought out and desired for who we are, and that our character defects or misdeeds, whatever they may be, are not a problem for God and do not decrease His desire to choose us to be a part of His people and to serve as His representatives.

So often the gospel is presented in such a way that makes it sound like God reluctantly agrees to accept people. It seems quite clear to me that this is not the case, at least according to the way I read scripture.

God loves the world so much that He chooses people and does whatever He needs to do so that people and God can live in harmony with one another. We are chosen.

And, according to you all, and I agree, this is foundational. It creates the sense that belonging is possible. We feel freed from the burden that we are too defective to be accepted and loved. Perhaps it allows us to feel like we already belong- even if we’re not sure exactly what that means.

Whatever the case may be, we all agree that belonging is a gift and that there are benefits to belonging and benefits to risking vulnerability in order to belong. And, we believe that God initiates this by choosing us to be a part of His people.

Like I said before, these are your thoughts. They are wise and profound. I have nothing to add.

There’s no place like home?

A few weeks ago while I was recovering from surgery my youngest son suggested we try to see how far I could walk down the street. He and I both love to walk. Together we walked, or perhaps more accurately, crept down the street - I was barely able to put one foot in front of the other. It had been a long time since the two of us have walked this particular road together. His streets are in the city now, with cracked sidewalks or the occasional ancient cobblestone. After we covered a couple hundred yards or so he said, "This street is exactly as I remember it." Same cracks; same potholes; same piles of pollen gathering along the edges of the blacktop road that he learned to ride his bike on or ran down to get to his friend Ryan's house. This is the same kid who once said, upon hearing that his dad and I were thinking about downsizing, "Who's going to pack up my childhood memories if you move?" He has a sense of PLACE.

I get it. I have a keen sense of place. Forever my place will be deeply rooted in the smell of my grandmother's home (mothballs), the sound of an air conditioner window unit (blessed relief after years of no air conditioning, the snap, crackle pop of bacon sizzling in the cast iron skillet, the squeak of a glider and the cracks on her concrete driveway. It was a house that held onto its quiet jealously and did not change with the whims of fashion. For me it was shelter from the storm of a home that housed lots of conflict and regularly tried to solve problems with geographic cures.

Place is important in the Bible too. Before God made his creatures, he made a place for them to reside that would encourage thriving. He created the heavens and the earth; he made light and dark. He created oceans for the sea creatures and dry land for the elephants and kangaroos. He called the earth to bring forth vegetation through the process of photosynthesis - which my granddaughter can explain to you in great detail. He made a perfectly lovely eco-system that mere mortals have been trying their best to mess up ever since.

PLACE is as important in the scriptures as the characters that inhabit it. Adam and Eve have a short term rental in the garden of Eden but are evicted because they cannot keep their hands off the apples. Abraham is told to leave his family and go to a new place - what a wild ride that road trip turned out to be. Moses leads his people out of captivity but can't quite get them to the promised land. I could go on and on. But it's not just the Old Testament. Jesus was FROM an actual place. He was born in an actual PLACE. Paul wrote letters to actual places: Galatia, Ephesis, Colossae, Philippi, Corinth. These were actual places with people living real lives. They struggled with floods and famine and sickness and health. They had babies and lost them. They got into fights about who is right and who is wrong about all manner of topics. Can we or can we not eat meat? What are the sexual mores of a church community? Circumcised...or not?

I wonder how many of us are paying attention to our place in this world. It's so easy to get distracted with the Facebook scroll and all the alluring beauty of the world found in places we can only long for. It's easy, I think, to be so distracted that we fail to notice our place in this world and stand firmly in it. Maybe we're busy wishing for our place to be different. Better housing - or housing at all. More abundance, less drudgery. The future...new possibilities....what can and might happen. How things can and should improve.

Every generation seems to suffer the opinion that the subsequent ones are going to mess up the works. This is laughable on so many, many levels but it remains true. It is indeed hard for a leopard to change its spots. When might we be willing to stop? Stand still. Pay attention. We get one shot at showing up and making a difference in the place we are born into. I've heard so many, many stories of place squandered through inattention and judgment.

Those that make a difference in the world are not the Instagram influencers. That's about something else. True influencers are those that encourage, support and create safe places for the hurting among us. I doubt that anyone looked at me as a youngster and said, "Man, that girl needs some extra support." But I got it in a place that feels as if it was carved out for me by the hands of God himself. It was a small red brick house that would never make it onto Snapchat. But it provided a shelter from a storm that was mostly hidden behind closed doors that went by the confusing name of "home."

Place matters, and it matters in the moment. Where we plant our feet on the soil that God prepared for us to stand on, under the sun that warms the earth and causes flowers and trees to break into bloom, our presence in PLACE MATTERS. We all gather around place in a very specific timeframe. Each generation has its own fights and feuds. It all feels very repetitive and petty. But among the ashes of vitriol and judgment, there are opportunities to do it differently.

In Cole Arthur Riley's book, This Here Flesh, she writes, "We train our focus on beauty here or there - this poem, that architecture - because it is easier than bearing witness to our own story. We begin to gravitate not toward beauty but toward illusion. In this state, you are not approaching what you seek. You are running from your own face. But this is not the way of wonder. Wonder requires a person not to forget themselves but to feel themselves so acutely that their connectedness to every created things comes into focus. In sacred awe, we are part of the story." p.37. Oh how I long for a world where it is hard to make snap judgments and live in a cocoon of illusory certainty. What a wonderful world it will be when we cannot judge, blame and accuse anyone because we experience the connectedness we have to every other created thing.

In the meantime, while we wait, I think of the alumni from The Healing Place (a local treatment program in our community) and how I love hearing their stories. It's always about place, the humble brick building where so many men, and now women, are finding their way to recovery. Without the place, there would be no central gathering spot for the people. The stories are always about the people who made a difference in this particular place. When a guy gets sober, he never talks about his story so much as he talks about THEIR story in that place. He names names and they are specific. Al. Justin. Stephen. Names who helped him move from darkness back into the light.

I can call to mind all the things I loved about 606 Ruby Street. I can ride by the house when I am traveling through town and even though that home has been neglected in recent decades, it still stands. Like my own son, I know this place, because it is more than bricks and mortar. Place matters because it serves as a hub for where people gather and what they do with their time while gathered. Place changes outcomes. I'm not sure what my own outcome would have been without the grounding I was given every summer, returning to what I considered my true home, although I could not have articulated this reality back then.

I want to leave you with this challenge...and opportunity. Where will your feet take you today or this week? What places do you inhabit? What about those places - humble though they may be - provides you with the opportunity to become part of a bigger story? Who occupies the space? What might they need? How can your relationship bring a little light, a bit of hope, to those who gather in those places with you?

God certainly knows that PLACE matters - after all, he started there with the creation story. I would ask you to consider how you could make a difference in the place you reside, if you stopped looking for the magnificent - this poem, this architecture, and instead considered the fact that your face and the body it is attached to has its own beauty, its own worth, and makes it possible for you to make a difference. Look, you can be that guy, the one who spends his time telling the next generation what they are getting wrong, or you can be the human who sees how we are all connected. And we all matter.