This week's Discover Five Minute Friday prompt from Kate Motaungs gradually aging FMF home is perfect for Celebrating Place!
Take Five {Minutes}:
One of my favorite exclamations is "Celebrate the City! Where the mind sees more than the eye!" With my somewhat extreme urban propensities, that would be an excellent start for five minutes of considering discover. Diversity of every kind is a hallmark of any metropolis, and in fact, variety belongs to any definition of city. But that's not my direction for this FMF. How many times have I mentioned the surface of the desertscape appears almost lifeless and unchanging, yet you don't need to be a biology or ecology expert to know the extreme amount of animal and plant life that teems just underneath the surface. I can't begin to estimate the times I've reminded my readers and myself how the exodus desert was the original constitutive experience for God's people on their way to the land of promise where they'd become settled and agricultural, where they'd rely on the earth become land to yield to their skills in farming, to respond to the life-giving and life-sustaining rivers that flowed through Canaan.
Life-giving and identity-restoring remains our experience in the physical, phenomenological deserts of this 21st century, in our relational and spiritual ones, too, as God in the power of the Holy Spirit of life nudges, directs, and strips us down to essentials. Despite all those palm trees everywhere and the Pacific Ocean right down the street, it can be hard to remember my current place of residence in southern California is a coastal desert. Visiting the land-locked Sonoran Desert in southern Arizona long has been one of my best reminders to look and discover what God has been doing underneath the apparent dryness and drought, to dig deep in all directions to celebrate the place of renewal and hope, the venue of God's unwavering presence that's the desert.
My family lives in the desert region of New Mexico. My kids love digging in the sand to see what they can find under the surface. I hope that you have a lovely weekend!
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