I’m a loser. You can ask my family and they will tell you; I cannot go anywhere and leave with everything I brought with me. It may be something small – a toothbrush, or my cell phone charger (on at least three different occasions in three different places) – but I will undoubtedly leave something behind.
I was struck recently by the fact that I also lose places when I leave them. It isn’t such an immediately felt loss, like a cell phone charger, but I think it is just as real. I went to my parents’ house for Christmas. I saw my brothers, some friends, and drove around the area I grew up in. I was present to it – it felt close and tangible.
I drove back to Chicago afterwards relatively unaware of that feeling until I stepped out of my car at my apartment and realized I was present to both places at once. I was close enough to both realities that I could hold them in my mind equally well. Slowly, I lost my awareness of my hometown in the same way, and it again became more memory than present, even though it didn’t stop being real.
They didn’t have speedy travel in biblical times, and I’m assuming that’s why Paul didn’t use the analogy of driving from Indiana back to Chicago when he talked about being in two world’s at once. Had he lived in the midwest in 2010, I think he just might have used it to describe that sense of being in two worlds, even if it’s briefly, holding them both in your mind, being present to both, but ultimately belonging in just one eternally (I do not intend to be in Chicago eternally, so the analogy breaks down). This idea is all over Paul’s writing, and I think for me it something that I am becoming more and more aware of in my own living.
Talk to me…
2 Responses to “I’m a Loser”
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good post.
I appreciate the way the Lord made the Bible so we are unable to live without noticing the obvious parallels, good and bad.