Where My Feet Are
One of my favorite artists, The Porter’s Gate, has a song called Centering Prayer. The lyrics begin with, “I want to be where my feet are. I want to breathe the life around me.” The song's rhythmic, comforting, repetitive beauty centers the listener in the simple prayer, “I want to be where my feet are.”
This line has been an earworm this week.
It’s been a long political season and an even longer week. As I preached last Sunday, no matter the result of the election, half of our nation would breathe a sigh of relief while the other half would feel like they’d had the wind knocked out of them. We simply didn’t know which half would feel what.
But now we do.
As a pastor, I have people I love breathing easier and people I love gasping for air. The space between those diverging breaths feels as deafening and ominous as the space between the labored breaths of the dying by whose bedside I’ve sat.
It is tempting to feel like I’m sitting bedside again to death, and in some ways, I am. Some things have died.
But I don’t want hope to be one of them. Hope is what I offer to grieving families, hope is what is offered to us in Christ, and hope is where I want my feet to be.
Amid uncertainty, pain, and change, I want to live on Hope Street. I want my heart’s home to be hope—not a hollow, feel-good hope, but a grounded, tenacious conviction that God is moving in this world.
A hope honest about reality but willing to work alongside the One who brings forth good even from the messiest places.
A hope that sees the hard in life not as tombs but as wombs where something good is yet to be born, and we are invited to be its midwives.
A hope committed to the peace-making, neighbor-serving, enemy-loving way of Jesus.
A hope whose feet are not in earthly princes or kingdoms but firmly placed in the kingdom of God, a place ever-present and available now.
James Bryant Smith wrote, “My life is rooted in the eternal and strong kingdom of God; the roots of my life are in the future, safe and secure, which gives me the strength to live unselfishly, to strive for unity in the midst of diversity, to forgive even when it is not easy, to set my standards high, to live generously, to long to be worshiping in the house of the Lord and to be a witness of new life to a dying world.”[I]
May we be rooted in the eternal and strong kingdom of God so that we can be people of hope in the present, breathing life around us and offering hope wherever we go.
May we be where our feet are.
[i] Smith, James Bryant (2010). The Good and Beautiful Community. Intervaristy Press, p. 19.