It’s tough to be in a place you didn’t choose and which you don’t like.  It’s harder still to make that place your home.

Maybe you got uprooted from a place you love and dropped into a place that is strange and not to your liking.  People get transferred for their employment.  People travel back to their ancestral homes to care for aging relatives.  These are a couple of the ways that we can get uprooted and planted somewhere we wouldn’t have chosen for ourselves.

But there are more traumatic ways to end up in a place you didn’t want to be.  How many families are displaced by hurricanes?  How many are making their way in a strange place because wildfires have destroyed their home or their whole town?

And even these folks are (relatively speaking) better off than the countless millions who throughout history, and right this minute, flee their homes to escape advancing armies or because famine or drought has made life unsustainable in the place they can no longer call home.

Sometimes the bad place we didn’t choose is not a place at all, but a diagnosis, or struggles with relationships that seem to have no easy resolution.

Jeremiah wrote to the people who had been marched on foot more than 1,500 miles for four or five months at the point of a sword.  They didn’t take this walk for their health.  They were exiles, made homeless and rootless by the army that conquered their land, killed their neighbors, and destroyed their capital city and Temple.

This is what he told them: 

Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat what they produce. …seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare. (Jeremiah 29:5-8)

He told them to dig in and live where they had landed. 

It wasn’t easy for them to hear or for us to hear, but it is essential.

We can spend our energy and time protesting to God that we don’t like this place.  We can be miserable and spread that misery to everyone around us.  Or we can build houses and plant trees where we are.  We can invest ourselves in this present, imperfect life and live in hope.

Prayer: Lord, you know I’d rather tell you about how hard things are, but if you insist, maybe I can spend a little energy planting a tree right here at my feet. Amen.