Where I am Meant to Be - Are You Where You are Meant to Be?

I took this photo while standing at my prayer desk. Doesn’t look like much. It’s a humble little church with scary space heaters and a tower that leaks into the narthex when it rains.

But in my mind I saw what had stood between me and the pulpit the day before.

A casket. A brown box. It looked anonymous. While the preacher preached, while the congregation prayed, while we sang, I pondered the life that had been lived by the body inside that box.

The preacher told some stories, didn’t tell other stories. I considered what neither the preacher nor I knew about this man whom I visited every month for two years.

But I never know much about the people I have buried, even those I knew well. The human heart. A mystery.

Even knowing the problematic stories that the preacher did not tell, I found myself at peace with this man. I gave him over to God.

That is where we all end, in God’s hands. The hands of love. So I feel free to love this man, to wish him peace.

I think about death these days. I live between two graveyards and walk through them, read the stones. Each of the five churches I serve have graveyards beside or around them.

Kevin Styles took this picture of St. James Church in Dingle, County Kerry. On Saturday, along with the Catholic priest, I blessed that white stone on the left side. There are four infants buried there.

I find myself relaxing toward my own death

    So teach us to number our days,
       that we may apply our hearts to wisdom.
    Psalm 90:12

Oh, I imagine my death is a ways off. My mother died when she was six years older than I am now, my grandmother when she was twenty years older. Running the lifestyle numbers, I think I’m likely to beat my mother, but maybe not my grandmother.

What wisdom do I gain by that calculation?

This, I suppose:

I stop to enjoy a breeze. Ireland is having a heat wave. But having lived in Iowa and Costa Rica, I know how to manage the heat in a house during a heat wave. So when I walked upstairs, past the window I had opened this morning to the cooler north side of the house, I felt a cooling breeze on my arm. I stopped. I enjoyed a breeze.

That is all.

Well, not all. When I first arrived in Ireland, I wrote about “leaving it all on the field.” That is a phrase from sport. It means holding nothing back near the end, so that the athlete is spent when the whistle blows.

I think I am spent. I think these are the gift years, the years I get to live in the present, to notice a cool breeze, to wave at the hikers who peer in our window as they walk by the gate, to hear a story at the coffee shop and make a note to include it in the intercessions for Sunday—and not to feel burdened by the responsibility, but rather glad that I can give that gift.

The present is a gift.

It took years, decades, most of my life before I could receive it. But now I do.

Another day I stood in that same spot and knew. I absolutely knew, that this is the precise spot, this one meter square spot, where I belong.

I have arrived at last.

And on Tuesday morning, this too is precisely where I am meant to be:

Are you where you are meant to be?