I’ve written more than once about place in the last year―the difficulty of saying goodbye to friends who live far away, the ache of homesickness, the comfort of God’s plan for the church. In each of these, the common thread is the presence or absence of people. Place is important because people exist in only one place at a time. But place is also ultimately unimportant because it is not the space itself, but the people who occupy that space, that I miss.
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A Return Trip
When the plane took off from LAX, careening over the Pacific and then swiveling to face the coast, I peered out the window and tried to figure out which pier sticking out over the water was the one my friends and I had stood on to watch the sunset. There were too many to tell, toothpicks against an opaque, wrinkled blue sheet. Roads faded into grids, houses into thumbnails. Everything looked so small. I thought about how all my friends and much of my family was contained in that tiny swath of land. Most of the people I interacted with over the summer―all enclosed by a plane window.
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