Moving is hard. When I
was a kid, we never moved. Well, I did move when I was 2 years old, but I don’t
remember it. I must have been sleeping. My parents may have bundled me up in a
bundler of some kind and put earmuffs on my ears and eyes (“eyemuffs”) and
kidnapped me to a new address so that the “big move” to a bigger house two
miles away would not unduly upset my precious world. And it was a precious
world. My parents made it that. They wanted me to have a precious world, and I
did.
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| Hanging out on Ivanhoe |
We moved from a street
called Ivanhoe in Canton , Ohio 4924 18th Street ,
where I lived until I was twenty. Not many people enjoy this kind of stability
anymore, what with the transient and violent nature of this planet and the eons
cradling it. Have you noticed the instability of this world? The earthquakes?
The hurricanes? The floods? The mudslides? The local newscasts? Just when you think you can count on things staying the same, the earth quakes, the mud slides, or the
news casts, and you find yourself wishing for the good old days of five minutes
ago.
The apostle Paul wants
us to be rooted and grounded in the truth: Ephesians 3:17-19:
Be
made staunch with power, through His spirit, in the human within, Christ to
dwell in your hearts through faith, that you, having been rooted and grounded
in love, should be strong to grasp, together with all the saints, what is the
breadth and length and depth and height, to know the love of Christ.
The
only way we can know the love of Christ is to be rooted and grounded in the
truth that Christ loves us. If you flinch or flicker in this knowledge, you
will often wonder whether the love of Christ really exists, or if it’s just a
passing fancy of His.
Stability
in life helps this. They say your first image of God is what you see in your
earthly father. Likewise, our first image of being rooted and grounded in the
love of Christ is the kind of rooting and grounding we experience early in
life. I speak of being settled during our formative years. I speak of having
time to develop relationships, of playing with the same kids, and having the
same neighbors stopping by for a drink on Christmas. This is not necessary to
a spirit-filled life, but is a gift of God helping set the foundation for
one. If you can provide this kind of stability for your kids, then try like
hell to do it.
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| But I still like you, Pikes Peak. |
For
all my bubbly, stir-the-pot nature, I love stability. This move from Colorado
has been hard. Moving to Colorado
was hard, because I had lived in Ohio
for 52 years. For a year, I struggled to adapt to my Colorado
home. Just when I got settled into the mountains and the sunshine and my
precious wife, my wife excised me from her life, and the mountains didn’t seem
to care about me any more. This still shocks my system; my system is used to
stability. Would I stay in Colorado ?
I thought I would. But the memories—which were everywhere—killed me softly. Some
people say I’m too emotional—stop it, you’ll make me cry. Change is foreign to
my nature and my upbringing, so it hits me like an 8.9 quake.
I am
now living in Pennsylvania , where
love and peace rise like morning mist from the oldest mountains here. (The
mountains here got formed and covered thousands of years before those of the Rockies .)
I want to travel. I am endeavoring to plug into the truth that God is
everywhere, and that I take the spirit of Christ with me wherever I go. I have
always known this, but now it enters the liver through the heart. If the spirit
of God makes its home in me (1 Corinthians 3:16), then I am at home wherever I
am. This high truth defies zip codes.
I am
looking forward to the stability of my celestial home from which neither I—nor
any of us—shall ever be excised.
©
2012 by Martin Zender
