Remember

People travel thousands of miles and spend great sums of money to stand in certain places.  For some folks a trip to the Holy Land is a must while others dream only of standing on a beach in Hawaii.  It is also true that some are married to ancestral land or homes. It is where they want to be and at the end of the day, it is where they want to stay.  There are even some ordinary places in the landscapes of our lives which feel like holy ground to us.  As we start looking back over the years of our life, most of us will see these places which tug at our heart and our soul.   

The Biblical story reminds us of the importance of geography in our personal faith journey.  The story told within those holy pages is not a story told in a vacuum, but a story told in deserts and river crossings, burial caves and battlefields, small towns and gardens, synagogues and hills.  The Old Testament writers were constantly writing stories about the way God made Himself known in certain places and then telling the people, "Remember."    

There are things about each of our stories of faith that are important to pass on to the generations which follow us and it is inevitable that these stories will have some physical context.  I think often of the recent death of a man I knew as family.  Having lived into his late 80's, he had great stories to tell. Some were about fishing, but some were about personal faith.  With his death, we lost a great story teller and a library of memories.  Even at the risk of being repetitive as older people are prone to be, we need to keep telling the young of our family about the places where our own life changing encounters with God took place and then tell them, "Remember."