How The Will of God Is a Place: How to Stop Dehumanizing People & Desecrating Places in the World

Farming has been in my blood for seven generations. For seven generations I have been rooted to land and place.

It’s our ground that grounds us.

Trace our worn family line back as far as you can, and you find we are a people of place-makers who work the earth, grounded in a place by the roots of our plants.

We’re as common as dirt.

It’s our ground that grounds us.

Walter Brueggemann and others have noted that adam—the Hebrew word for man—shares its root with adamah, the word for ground. We’re not just from the earth. We’re of it. Place isn’t just where we live—place is part of who we are.

The places we live aren’t merely geographical but are relational too. What if we eschewed our own comfort — to be for others, the comfort of Christ? 

This spring, I sat in a home in Romania that belongs to a young Russian man, Damir, and his wife, Larianna, who’s the daughter of a Ukrainian and a West African. Their children’s paintings dance across the walls, welcoming us. Larianna has just pulled a loaf of apple bread out of the oven. She sets it on a trivet on the corner of her table, beside a stack of plates.

“My father was from Guinea,” she tells us. “He came to Ukraine to study at university, way back when Ukraine was still part of the Soviet Union, and he fell in love with my mother; she’s Ukrainian.” Larianna cuts generous slices of the steaming bread and plates them before us. “My father’s black and my mother’s white. But because it was the Soviet Union then, it was not allowed for her to get married to an African.”

I listen—seated beside a Russian man in Romania and eating his Ukrainian wife’s apple bread—and taste the words that Jesus spoke: “I was a stranger and you welcomed me” (Matt. 25:35).

“As we were fleeing Ukraine,” Damir says before pausing to take another bite, “a Romanian border guard saw my Russian passport and asked a lot of questions: ‘Where are you going?’ ”

When love is mostly self-seeking, do people mostly miss seeing the face of God?

I wonder:

Where do you go when the very dust from which you’ve come quakes beneath incoming tanks and exploding bombs? When the roof meant to shelter your children becomes a target on some war-monster’s radar screen?

“No one leaves home unless / home is the mouth of a shark,” wrote Somali British poet Warsan Shire.

Where do you go when the soil on which you were birthed won’t give you the right paperwork and all the fury of hades breaks loose?

Click Here to finish this column at Christianity Today: The Will of God is a Place