Space is not neutral. I don’t mean that space either belongs to Jesus or the demons or something like that, that’s silly: Jesus’ reign is supreme and demons that infest places need to leave when his people tell them to. The whole world is his, and therefore ours. Rather, I mean that space affects the activities that we do in it.

This morning I sat on the floor in a house I dearly love, emptied of all its things. The three of us—Helen, me, and the cat—sat on the floor after the removal guys had taken all of our earthly possessions and packed them onto a van.

We’re moving a few hours south, a long way on our little island at the edge of the windswept sea, for me to be a Pastor in a church here. This involves lots of change for us, as you might just imagine, and more beyond wondering if they’ll serve gravy with their chips down here. I’m not a Midlands lad, but 20 years in a place rubs off on you.

That’s it, a place rubs off on you. We’re moving for a new adventure in the Lord; we’re moving for good reasons and we’re happy about it. Yet, we sat on the floor, the three of us, and we wept. Or, two of us did, the cat seemed happy enough.

There’s a weight to leaving somewhere, especially somewhere that you’ve invested in. We’d made that house exactly what we wanted through the sweat of our own brow. I’ve told some of that story here before, but in precis we bought a wreck of a place, a slough of chaos. It got worse as we were swindled out of our savings. We rebuilt that ruin by the strength of our arms and the callouses of our hands, learning many skills in the process. We turned dust into beauty, carving spacious places from the wood-worm ridden, asbestos filled, pile of bricks we’d purchased.

We’d made it ours, and we’d done a fine job. Leaving it for a smaller place in a more expensive part of the country is galling, for all we’ve been blessed in many ways and the house we’re buying, that I’m sat in right now, is perfectly nice.

It would seem right to say, ‘it’s just bricks and mortar, why get emotional about it?’ That’s a reasonable question, but I want to suggest that place matters more than we like to think it does. The place doesn’t matter just because we had a nice house that we liked and that worked for us, but it matters for two reasons.

First, this was the work of our hands. We had made beauty from ashes. It’s not so much the amount of time or resources spent, it’s that we fought and won. Victory leads to love. Mastery leads to love. To make beauty is a worthy thing; to render it from proverbial ‘death’ is a holy thing.

Second, this was the place that we had loved and fed so many. This is where the table sat that we gathered around, this is where we prayed and wept and sang and rejoiced, this is where life happened. The life is more important than the place, but it’s not like it could have just happened anywhere. Places are not incidental. I learned that when I worked in pedagogy at a University; the shape and layout of a classroom changes the kind of learning its good for.

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