| Sunny Side Up March 9, 2005 �2004 Kathleen Gibson Where are you from? "Where are you from?" I ask people sometimes. They tell me their native country, the city they called home, the street they grew up on. If I listen long; if I'm lucky, their voices soften, their eyes lose their sharp focus, and before I know it, they've taken me there. Whether at a kitchen table, in a car or a coffee shop, we sit very still and go places. Meander old trails, revisit familiar routines, search the stillish dark or the bedlam of noisy memory. Sometimes their stories make me laugh. Sometimes I cry. Always I learn - often things I never wished to know. But in all the years I've been asking people where they're from, few have answered with a story of how their spirits came to the place they are at that moment. With all our new openness about spirituality, the spirit for many is still uncharted territory. Ask any surgeon you want; so far not one has found a human spirit. It's there all the same - a built-in yearning for connection with that which is bigger, wiser, more loving and just than we are. We yearn for God. When we ignore that and refuse to admit the paths that yearning has led us through, we become hollow people. Even if we feel we've explored it, the place we call our spirit often remains a lonely hall. Seldom do we give it adequate care; even rarer do we allow others in to view the pictures on the walls or hear us recite from the internal journals that faithfully record the paths of our soul and register divine footprints. So, let me ask you: Where are you from? Not geographically. Spiritually. When you consider the part of you that is the deepest, the nearest to God or the farthest from him, where did you get that? Did you ever walk on holy ground, feel God's warm breath? When danger stalked, did you hold the hands of angels? Did you ever fall asleep in the black night humming, "Jesus loves me, this I know;" assured that you weren't alone, that someone good and kind and loving watched, 'your soul to keep.' Did you find a sacred place in a garden, a pew, a forest? Or did you feel abandoned by everything that seemed secure and right, cheated by a remote and unfair God, angry at the people who represented him? Did you tire of playing the church game one day, so you just never returned? Does the Jesus you once loved, who you once knew loved you, seem a distant echo of a na�ve childhood fantasy? I get lost, frequently, while traveling to unfamiliar places. Sometimes I call and ask for directions. Funny, but I'm always asked: "Where are you now? What road are you on?" Spiritual journeys are like that. Unless we recognize where we've been, no one - even God - can help us get closer to himself. Where are you from? More importantly, where are you to? Tell God. Respond here Home |
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