Place

"Mom has got her eyes on you, mine are on the road, and Gabe's are staring off at Kansas City.
We all swear that it's a precious view, seen by such a precious few, and it'll change you just as sure as it is pretty."
----- From Andrew Peterson's "Clear to Venus."

One conclusion I've come to is that matter matters. And more than that, place matters. Many of us at points in our lives imposed a very Platonic view of reality upon our Christianity. We believed it was the ideas and ideals and the intangibles that were good. The things we could touch and see were irrelevant at best, evil at worst. Place was valued only insofar as it provided a setting for experiencing the holy. Little did we know that, perhaps, it was the place that was holy.

At one point in my life I sang "Better is one day in your courts than thousands elsewhere," and would do everything I could to contort my mental image of "God's courts" into a place that was very much unlike whatever place I was in. God's courts was somewhere other than where I was. But yesterday during worship at church, while singing "better is one day in your courts than thousands elsewhere" my mind raced like an eagle over the geography of this world and identified several distinct places that are, in my experience of knowing God, holy. The lobby of Feagin Hall where I learned to listen. The old sanctuary at First Baptist Church, Chandler where I first sensed love from people other than biological family. Tony and Melissa's old house on Jim Hogg road where we would sit early on Saturday mornings after a night camping out in the freezing cold, listening to Tony play his classical guitar so softly that it put us all to sleep. The Songe's flat in Tartu Estonia where I learned to sit and to visit and to cherish company. Here, the place I sit and think and hope to have something worthwile to say. The forests of East Texas as expressed through Timberline, Caddo Lake, Chandler, with surroundings that alternately provide feelings of fear and comfort. And many more places. All holy places. All the courts of God. All places that God has chosen in my life to use in changing me. All places that are better to be than thousands of "elsewhere" places.

When I hear a pastor-like figure say things like "This place, these surrounding don't matter. Pay attention to what God is doing in your heart," I'll just smile to myself and hope that someone, somewhere will be able to impart to the hearers what many faithful have imparted to me-- That place matters. What God is doing in your heart can never be divorced from the things that surround you that can be felt and seen and experienced.