No Mere House

As we turned our shoulder away from our old home in our old town, my mind was flooded with memories of happy times within those walls. We left something in that house that isn't physical -- a part of us that we possess now only in our recollections.

Some will say that place doesn't matter -- one is just as good as another, it doesn't matter where you are. I emphatically disagree. Places are made holy by the presence of God and his children, and the time that passes for us in them. We are not disembodied spirits, floating about in empty, vacuuous space. We "who are bone and spittle and muscle and sweat" -- we are rooted to place, to earth, the place God has created for us.

Good-byes are a part of the Edenic Fall. Being torn away from people and places, these are evils that we must endure -- pains that press us ever closer to the breast of God. They remind us that this world is broken, and that deep, lasting happiness is not to be found by it. But place does matter, and when this age comes to an end, God won't do away with place, he will redeem and recreate it.

(The picture is not our new home, by the way.)