My school friends and I often ask each other if we want to live in New York City long-term. I suspect it’s a common topic of conversation in college―we’re young and unable to predict the future, eager to know where we will land, imagining what it will be like to move out of a dorm and become a real adult with a real life (whatever that means). We know we might be here only temporarily, but we wonder if this place is more than a waiting room, a bus terminal, a departure gate. Would you stay?
I think this is also a very New York question. People most often move here for work, but many young professionals and post-graduates also want to experience New York. A lot of them don’t intend to stay permanently. It’s the real estate, the lack of space, the rats, the noise at night. And it’s the difficulty of raising a family in such a crowded, crazy city.
So comes the inevitable question. Would you stay?
The most common answer I get is something along the lines of: stay for several years to work while single, then move away to settle down and start a family. The rationale is that New York is a good place to be as a single, but not so much for families. New York is temporary. This was my thought process last year. If you had let me map out my ideal post-grad life, I would have wanted a publishing job and an apartment in Manhattan for maybe five or so years before moving back to the suburbs of Los Angeles where I grew up. I would get married and have two children, live in a house with a driveway and a porch and a yard, attend the same church as my parents.
I’m thankful for my childhood home and my faithful parents. I’m thankful for the privilege of having grown up middle class, not having to worry about food on the table or education or having a place to sleep. And I’m thankful for my church at home and its love for the gospel. I wanted to return home for all these things.
But I have also come to realize that I was more homesick last year than perhaps I cared to admit. It was easy for me to idealize home. I was not as impartial as I thought I was. I began to realize this over the last semester as my priorities shifted toward church fellowship and I became increasingly thankful for my local church in New York. I’m thankful for their generous hospitality, even with a limited square footage to share. I’m thankful for their loving patience to concern themselves with the things I care about. I’m especially thankful for their genuine joy in knowing and worshiping the Lord, which encourages me to press on in my faith.
Would I stay? I hope I do. I love my church. I love the individuals that compose First Baptist Church. I like New York, but it’s my church that makes me want to stay longer than just college or five years post-grad. Leaving after graduation would be hard, not so much because I couldn’t find another Reformed Baptist church with similar theological convictions and a strong community, but because leaving means saying goodbye to these particular people.
For humans, as embodied creatures, are confined to one place at a time. Our bodies are parcels of material, physical matter that occupy and move through space. Even when we say, I’m with you in spirit to long-distance friends, it’s implied that there is something missing. Our bodies are not inessential. Perhaps this is why we refer to physical, face to face interactions as “in-person,” since electronic or written communication does not involve our whole embodied person. We know this far better after the pandemic deprived most of us of close in-person interaction and moved work and school online. No matter how much technology advances, we haven’t been able to replace face to face contact and I doubt we ever will.
I think the Bible also intuitively recognizes our need for embodied interaction. John writes, “Though I have much to write to you, I would rather not use paper and ink. Instead I hope to come to you and talk face to face, so that our joy may be complete” (2 John 1:12). Being embodied also means that we aren’t omnipresent. A physical body can only be in one place at a time; and so a person can only be in one place at a time. Human presence is limited, finite.
All this to say that place matters because people matter and people are not omnipresent. Moving away from any place means moving away from people who are bounded to and contained in that place. Moving away from New York means moving away from the people at my church. As I grow to love the members of First Baptist, I shrink from the thought of leaving so quickly. I want to be here, in the same place as the people I love.
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.
At the same time, though it is a sweet thing to love my local church and to want to stay with them, I know also that I am tempted to become shortsighted and doubtful of the Lord’s providence in other places. There are moments when I catch myself thinking that First Baptist is the only church I could love this much, the only church I could commit to this wholeheartedly. I used to find it odd that older saints moving away from the city in the near or distant future could make such a decision without being devastated.
Yet I think they trust in the Lord to sustain and bless other congregations. They know that his reach is not short. They know that the church’s faithfulness rests ultimately on the faithfulness of God, not the leaders nor the members. And though people are limited by place, God is truly omnipresent, transcendent over both space and time, present in every local church that is a part of the body of Christ.
It is good to be at one church for many, many years, to choose to stay in a place because of the church. But I am also learning to keep this love from becoming exclusionary of the Lord’s far more expansive plan. I am learning to say, in response to the question―Would you stay?―not that I must stay, and not only that I want to, but that I would stay, if the Lord wills, with a glad heart. And that I would leave, if the Lord wills, with not a little sorrow but also much hope.