The greenway I walked this morning ends at the church where I served as pastor for forty years.
I stood there in the early morning light, at the edge of a place that had shaped the better part of my life. The building was quiet. No one around yet. And I found myself doing what early morning walks always seem to invite for me— reflecting.
I found myself thinking about place. About what it means to belong somewhere. About the profound and often unacknowledged gift of having a place to call home.
I have been fortunate — more fortunate than I sometimes remember to acknowledge — to have spent most of my professional life rooted in two locations that have nurtured my growth in ways I’m still discovering.
Locust Grove and Athens State.
I attended college at Athens State and have had the privilege of teaching there now for over twenty years. Climbing the stairs to my office in Founders Hall (where I took many classes as a student) isn’t work; it feels like coming back home.
These places are not just addresses, buildings, or institutions to me. They are a part of who I am. I cherish them not only for their architecture—though there is beauty there—but for their history, the people, the connections made, and the unfolding stories still being told within their walls.
There is something about a place that holds memory in a way that nothing else quite can. You walk through a door, and something stirs. You stand in a familiar room and the years come rushing back — not as nostalgia, but as presence. The past becomes alive again, not behind you, but around you.
I found myself standing at the end of that greenway this morning, reflecting on forty years of ministry. Hundreds of funerals and weddings and Sunday mornings. Countless conversations in hospital rooms and living rooms and across kitchen tables. All of it gathered in that one quiet place, in the morning light.
Reflecting on the gift of place brought to mind a conversation I had with one of my uncles years ago. He once told me he never felt that he had a true home. After his father died, his family fractured, and he was moved from place to place throughout his youth. I remember the sadness in his voice as he described it.
He told me this after my grandmother’s funeral. We had taken her back to the little cemetery in South Alabama that she considered home. I had mentioned at her funeral that no matter where life had taken her, this place was her anchor. It was her point of reference.
I never had a point of reference, he told me. What he was describing, I think, was the absence of a place to call home. A place to return to. A geography of belonging.
As I made the last turn of my walk, the lake and then our house came into view. I found myself thinking about the house where Vickie and I have lived for nearly twenty years.
I knew — without any doubt — that she would be in the kitchen. Probably finishing her second or third cup of coffee. More than likely she had already started a project. She has always made our house a home. All these years, she has decorated our house and made it beautiful.
Reaching the end of my walk this morning, I did what I too often forget to do-I said thank you.
Not out loud, exactly. But deeply. Quietly.
The sacred gift of place is not something we earn. It is something we receive. And like all true gifts, it asks something of us in return — not payment, but attention. Presence. Gratitude.
It asks us to notice the place we stand.
It asks us to stand still for a moment in the early morning light, at the end of a greenway.
I quietly said thank you and went into the house.
EnSpirit 