Dear Cornerstone Family,
I’m preaching for my friend, Dr. Harry Reeder, at Briarwood Presbyterian Church in Birmingham, AL, this week, which means I’m without your dear and precious fellowship one more week. I look forward, however, to being back with you next week and bringing our July Psalm series to close. I wanted to share a passage from my journal this week, as I reflected on my time in London, England, and the meaningfulness of all places, great and small, where God is at work. God bless you, my dear friends. I can’t wait to see you!
Samuel Johnson once wrote, “When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life. For there is in London, all that life can afford.” Having spent most of the last week in London, I’d have to concur with the good Doctor. London is in a category all to itself. A place set apart, full of history and legend, intrigue and romance, treasure and tragedy. To know London is to know the story of the world itself.
Lest I give London too much credit, the same could be said for any place that is loved. It is the living in and loving of a place that sets it apart, that fills it with history and legend, intrigue and romance, treasure and tragedy. Surely, I could say all these things about Franklin. I could even make the same claim about my hometown, Laurel.
To be clear, Laurel isn’t on the same scale as London. From one angle, it’s laughable to compare them. But they are the same in this sense: in both places people lived, loved, and discovered what mattered. That is to say, within these particular places, the universals––what mattered––were made known.
This is why, at least in part, anyone who has lived and loved deeply in a place will claim their place is the best. We should never fault them for that, for they are telling the truth of their soul. They are letting you know how full of meaning this place is to them. They are saying, in a way of speaking, they don’t know how to understand, much less tell, the story of their life without this place. Their place means the world to them, for place, as Hazel Motes, says, ‘...is all you got.’
For the Christian, this has special meaning, I think. For we have a theology of place that makes sense of this. We know our home, Eden, has been lost, but our sense of need for home is still very much with us. And so, London and Laurel are to us “signposts” as Walker Percy would say. Signposts that point us beyond our place to THE place where we are truly from, to our primeval home. We mustn’t, however, try to return to our primeval home or hold onto our earthly homes too tightly. We must, instead, keep moving into these places until we come home at last.
Your Servant,
