A sense of place
 
One of the problems of not blogging for a while--especially when I’ve gone through a pretty major transition--is that I really don’t know where to start. We moved from a very nice suburb to the South Loop neighborhood which, as the name implies, is just south of the Loop in downtown Chicago. When we go play in the local park, in other words, the Sears Tower looms close by. So many experiences both good and bad, but I’ll try to be better at updating and spread out my observations. For the most part, things have gone fairly well. We’re not close to completely unpacking or arranging our furniture or hanging our pictures and I’m finding that it’s pretty hard to live that way. If I never see or smell another corrugated box, I’ll be OK with that. I think all of us want to feel a sense of sacred space, that this is a place we can call home. Unpacking, for us, is a part of that. I know Jesus and his disciples lived a pretty nomadic life and I imagine they didn’t have a life’s worth of things that they lugged around with them, but, well, I guess I’ll seek forgiveness for wanting to find a place for my books and baseball cards. The thing I’m still trying to get my head around is living in this urban setting, so close to so many things. We’re about a mile or so from so many things. All the museums (Field, Shedd, Art Institute), Chinatown, Little Italy, Grant Park (our dinner last night was a trip to Taste of Chicago), the lake. At times that’s exhilarating and at times, with so many buildings standing over us, it feels a bit claustrophobic. Which takes me back to a sense of home and place. That will come in time, I know. It always has. But it doesn’t come right away and so we seek to build that together as a family and as we reach out to our new neighbors and, people who want to be part of a new church.
Thursday, July 2, 2009