Sanctuary, defined as a sacred or safe place, a shelter for the has been or the hopeful. That’s these two for me, a scant ¼ mile apart, so close the front steps of one can be seen from the other. One just greeted its 75th year, the other is scheduled to greet a wrecking ball. These are the places where I learned in the abstract, about love your neighbor & Jesus loves the red, yellow, black & white & me in the one that seats 800, and where it got applied in the concrete in a crackerbox gym that sat 300, in a hallway or a cafeteria that sat under that gymnasium or later in a self made wilderness that I wandered. Where I learned the theology of place, that where my feet are is where I should go about my Creator’s business that day, that it’s easy to be a holy man shouting alone at the top of a mountain, a little harder when chased by the echoes or chased by the silence of the valley. Where I learned most sunrises come with the options, quit or keep going, & both choices are gonna hurt. That the lights of will, grit, & faith don’t always burn bright, especially where the tunnel is darkest, but the flame can only be extinguished by my doubt.

That manna still falls, that there’s always a giant tumbling stone to fit my sling, like Caleb & Joshua standing tall against the 10 that I can too, that there’s no testimony without the test, that angels come in varied shapes & varied shades of melanin, that those angels teach 1st graders in Sunday School about Noah & rainbows, come dressed as old men prepping a rec center for summer, or coaches, or English & Math instructors, or encouraging librarians, & in one case, a school janitor with a dust mop. That the stone that rolled away made a one way trip & it ain’t rolling back, that like Jimmy Chitwood in a huddle of Hickory Huskers, I know at sunrise, that whether the day is dressed in pewter gray clouds or ends in a brilliant sunset from God’s box of Crayolas, I can say “I’ll make it “!