“Where your pleasure is, there is your treasure; where your treasure is, there is your heart; where your heart is, there is your happiness.” – St. Augustine
Airports can be fun places to observe people. As you wait for your flight, you can see all different people. However, everyone at the airport have one thing in common – they have not arrived.
Frequent flyers will understand this. You have left your original location and find yourself as not yet arrived at your destination. You are in a place of in-between. This is also known as the liminal space.
Very often we feel this deep in our everyday places. We feel like we do not belong. Either we feel like an outsider, someone in exile, or a good actor trying to pretend we belong. All of these feelings are feelings of the liminal space. We know where we have been, but we feel, deep inside us, that we have not arrived.
The place we currently find ourself feels like an airport. We count down the beats of our life-clock hoping we will be off to our destination where we belong.
However, what if we are not seeing our place properly. What if the thought of not belonging really is just a way for Satan to distract us from our relationship with God and his purpose for us?
The God of placing
Does God care about the place we are? Or does he only care about us fulfilling our obedience to him?
Good question!
So often we focus on living for God no matter where we are. We focus on doing and doing and following while wanting to escape the world for Heaven, that we forget about something –
God is the God of our placing!
God places each of us exactly where he wants us. In Genesis 2:8, God places the man he created. However, God created the place for the man first. He set up Eden exactly how he wanted it before he placed the man. In Jonah 1:17, God prepares a place for Jonah – the great fish or whale (at least it wasn’t a situation where Jonah needed a bigger boat). Even though Jonah was running from God, God still prepared a place for Jonah. It was not a place of exile or a liminal place. It was God’s place of meeting, resting, healing, and refocus.
God prepares our place for us. It is not just in Heaven, but also here on earth.
The God of forming
But is the place where we find ourself right for us?
We often want to escape for Heaven, because we feel we are not the right person in the right place. We preach to ourselves that the only “right place” for us is Heaven.
Let’s look at Scripture in a different way. Genesis 2:7 shows God forming man in order to place him in Eden. (Read Revelation 21 to see how we are created for an eternity on Earth rather than in Heaven.) God spent time forming man out of the dust of the ground. God speaks every other part of creation into existence (Genesis 1). For man, God takes time to create, form, and sculpt. He makes men and women in his likeness; after his image. This means that humans have a pattern in their DNA modeled after their Creator.
God designs us in wonderful ways, writes down all of our days, and places us (Psalm 139:13-16). What are the things in your life that you feel like keep you as an outsider or feel in exile? Those are things God designed and knitted into your being for the place where he created you.
Daniel was not created with the personality or faith to be second in command in Egypt. Esther was not created with the faith to be the mother of the Savior. David was not created with the knowledge to be the wisest man in Biblical history. Each story in Scripture shows us how God created each one of us with exactly what we needed to be in the place where we find ourself. Think of Peter being the king of Israel. Think of Ruth being the mother of Jesus. There is a reason why God places them where they are.
God forms each individual to be placed where he has us. My father is a doctor, but my personality does not fit the medical field. That is why God did not place me there. We may feel we are placed in exile or as an outcast in society, but God formed us in order to be in that place for him.
The treasure in our heart
Investment. I hate words that deal with numbers. Anything that causes me to think about numbers, math, and pulling things out from my schooling in math gives me a headache. However, investment does not necessarily mean numbers and money.
Jesus tells us that where our treasure is, there is where we will find our heart (Matthew 6:19-21). The context is keeping our hearts focused on heavenly things. But, what if being focused on heavenly things is to be focused on the place where God placed us for a specific purpose?
Hear me out…
God forms us for a specific place to carry our a specific purpose. If we invest our money in our place in order to carry out God’s purpose, is that not placing our treasures on heavenly things? For example, think about teachers. Majority of teachers must use their own resources to decorate and fill their classroom for students. They put their treasure into their classroom for the investment in students and for the use of students. I do not know many teachers who want to take a vacation in their classroom since it is set up for the students’ success.
It is the same for us. Are we putting our treasure into the place where God has placed us? When we do so, we begin to see the liminal space transform into our destination and calling. We no longer want to escape to Heaven. Instead, we see our heart where our treasure is – the location God places us for his purpose.
Are we investing into our placing?
Leaving the Liminal
The airport is a good example of what a liminal space is – the space between spaces. However, so often we see our life as one big liminal space till we get to Heaven or till everything is comfortable for us. We do not full grasp the beauty of being promised that we are created for such a time and place as this (Esther 4:14).
Our airport is really our placing. When we trust God with our placing, we are no longer an outcast or in exile. Instead, we are walking in the presence of God where he wants us. We find our heart swelling with Christ’s love, because we invest in our placement for God’s glory. The more we invest, the more difficult it is to say goodbye to the ones we have loved like Christ loved.
So where do we find our happiness? Is it in the longing of Heaven? Or is it in the investing in our placing?
We all must come to the place where we stop longing for grass on the other side. We all must experience the pleasure in the placing God formed for us.
That is where our happiness is.
Braced By Truth 