Know Thyself

We commonly hold skewed understandings about life meaning and geography.  Some of us ought to leave the community of our birth as soon as parentally prepared and convinced that our visions demand removal from our communities of birth.  The lead editorial in Books and Culture for September/October, 2014, entitled Stranger in a Strange Land by Collin Hansen, accents the benefits of settling in one’s home community for life – to benefit for giving and receiving to and from family and neighbors.  Hansen rightly points out that there must be those who move from place to place if the world is to be evangelized as the Scripture insists it must be.  The Apostle Paul became a world traveler, and drew to himself others who would make the same commitments, even to the point of choosing to remain unmarried, although marriage did not slow the travels of the Apostle Peter.  The other Apostles seem to have centered in various areas.

I have travelled the world in the course of a long lifetime living in the following general communities for extended lengths of time. After leaving the Akron/Cleveland, Ohio area at 17 years of age, I went to Nyack/ New York City, to Lincoln/Nebraska, to Wheaton/Chicago, to Buffalo/Minneapolis, to Spokane/Seattle, and to San Francisco/California.  During those transitions I traveled the world mostly in ministry (professional purposes for government, business and church hosts).   After 17 years in San Francisco, I asked my wife where she wanted to make our retirement home.  She wanted to return to Minneapolis  and Buffalo, Minnesota that we had left thirty years earlier.  She felt: There is where community means something and everyone can make contribution and be cared about to become the better persons they can become.  We made the move, three of our children and their mates are here, and old friends greeted us as though decades had not aged us out.  She was never happier in her personal and social life and meaning as during the final fourteen years until her death.  She, a daughter of California birth, thought this heaven’s vestibule.  Had I not traveled the world and had the magnificent experiences that attended my professional life, I now realize that if I had remained in this lovely town of about 15,000 inhabitants, situated by several beautiful lakes I could have been as fulfilled and gratified with my life, personally and professionally, as I sense it has been.  God is not much interested in our search for recognition, wealth, as that we find a place where the quality of our lives reaches toward elevating heights and service to others – where we find them.

Jesus came from a small village.  People tried to put him down – being from that tiny town, Nazareth, the smallest burg in Galilee and separated from the main centers in Judea by the Samaria province.  For his last years he removed his center of ministry to Capernaum, not for any loss of appreciation for Nazareth, but likely for the reaction of his parents’ neighbors and lack of support from the younger sons of Mary and Joseph.  He never travelled more than a hundred miles or so from one point to another.  Some analysts try to place him in the Far East for travels before he emerged in his own ministry.  There is a community in Japan that claims he moved there and became a mushroom farmer until his death.  There is no evidence for the claims that he traveled from Palestine to Spain affirm some old traditions – undocumented.  Jesus changed the world in giving his time to the ordinary folk with whom he grew up, and those included persons with diseases that forced them into cave communities on the outer edges of society. He had little to do with the rich and powerful except as those persons sought him out.  Even persons of means were careful about the peasant preacher.  Nicodemus came by night.  Another man pleaded that he had power to order others.  Jesus might not wish to go to his house – so to heal the man’s child from the distance of the meeting.  Jesus did visit.  He gained support from power persons, but that was not important to him.  To have acted other than he did would be to weaken the importance of humility to life – both physical and spiritual.  We may not easily grasp the importance of humility to much of life in love, truth, learning, place and effectiveness in God’s kingdom – to penitence.  Herod, having heard of this ancient Houdini, wanted to see a miracle.  Jesus stood silent.  Without truth in humility in us, sometimes of place, we fail our faith meaning.  It is interesting that Jesus prayed in tears for Jerusalem but drew his closest followers from ordinary places.