We live in a time in which family and place are not highly valued by most people.
Peopel will move away from home for many reasons, jobs, divorce, or unhappiness and dysfunction.
We also live in a time that takes God's geographical will for us out of the equation of life. We arrogantly and selfishly think we can reason our way ahead through lifes adveristies by our own wisdom and skill.
The reality we see in our society testifies to the fallacy of that way of living.
For those who have the blessing of staying in one place the rewards are many. But life even in the best of times and places is not perfect.
We can mess it up badly!
But our Lord is merciful and even if you find yourself far from home and unhappy in your choices he will help you make the most of where your are and become a blessing to the place and people around you.
In her excellent book "Uprooted: Recovering the Legacy of the Places We Left Behind" Grace Olmstead helps us understand the value of place.
Let’s Talk About It with Grace Olmstead
Video from Idaho Commission for Libraries
Uprooted: Recovering the Legacy of the Places We Left Behind
Recorded April 7, 2022
Log Off Instagram. Embrace Your Place.
"Review: ‘Uprooted: Recovering the Legacy of the Places We’ve Left Behind’ by Grace Olmstead
It’s been 15 years since I moved to the land of citrus, sun, succulents, and surf, and I’ve put down new roots here. I love this place. But the longer I’m in California, the more I appreciate the Midwestern places that shaped me; the more my soul longs, in that Sehnsucht sort of way, for the Oklahoma and Kansas soil that first nourished me.
These feelings bubbled up with force as I read Grace Olmstead’s lovely new book, Uprooted: Recovering the Legacy of the Places We’ve Left Behind—a Wendell Berry–esque meditation on place, membership, and the complex ways ecosystems (whether farms or family or churches) thrive because of lasting commitments, or suffer for lack of them.
“Sometimes you don’t sense or understand your roots, how they make you what you are, until you’ve been uprooted” (8), Olmstead writes, framing the book as an exercise in discernment on whether she stays in her transplanted place (Virginia) or returns to her formative place (Emmett, Idaho). But while Uprooted reads in part like a memoir, it’s also a work of wide resonance. Indeed, it’s an urgent call to recover a love for the particularities of embedded locality in a world of homogenization, mobility, and disconnection.
from the article: Log Off Instagram. Embrace Your Place.
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