Here And Nowhere Else

The places God puts people

Let me say a word of thanks to all of you who have subscribed to my Substack! I’m glad you’re aboard. What follows below is a third post concerning my latest setback in health, one which has put a heavy burden on me as I adjust, learn, and try to recover some semblance of normal life. Whatever that is.

The scene is usually tense.The background music adopts an eerie sound, heightening the tension. And that tension reaches its peak as two figures confront one another. One has been The Hunter; the other The Hunted. Whatever hopes of escape the hunted may have entertained now evaporate as the two see one another eye to eye. And now with a sudden grin, the hunter breaks the silence with words which have become a immortal movie trope:

“I have you where I want you!”

Sad to say, the sheer predictability of that phrase in that kind of movie at that particular moment of the story has, and always will, eviscerate whatever drama had been unfolding previously. Those words cannot even be said to reverberate in the ear before every sentient being in the theater immediately knows what follows next. The Hunted escapes. Or fights The Hunter to the death. Or witnesses a gratuitous intrusion of a monster, mutiny, or meteor which at that very moment delivers a death-blow to The Hunter, whose life ends with a bewilderment which no audience can pity.

There is, however, more to this trope than what meets the eye. Life can imitate art; indeed, life can fire this trope at us, point-blank. Circumstances may surround and influence us in ways which make us self-conscious of who we are, where we are, what we are, and why it is that we occupy such a time and space.

Historical Particularity

There is a name to the phenomenon we are describing. We can call it “historical particularity.” Although it has a long conceptual pedigree, there is a present cultural resistance to this principle. How so?

Historical particularity suggests that life as we experience it is embedded in something particular: a time, or a place, or in company with other people. The very acknowledgement that we have different perspectives on a subject is evidence of such ties and effects. And it would seem that this is a truism which no one would dispute.

But such is not the case, and a moment’s reflection helps us understand why. Among the various nostrums of “woke culture” is a resistance to anything which obstructs my quest to discover and live out my identity as I inwardly perceive it. The cultural movement which most deeply is invested in such resistance is the Trans Movement, which spans a spectrum of ideologies from transgenderism to transhumanism. It is the particularity of the body, for example, which is the source of much grief for trans ideology. People speak of themselves as victims of a body which is configured “wrongly” - that it possesses male or female organs or skeletal structure or some other physiological condition which our inner self finds objectionable. For Transhumanism, it is the body as a body which is the problem; hence, the various quests to fuse our “minds” to something else.

This bias, I suspect, is the driving force of a very recent article at Christianity Today. In it, the author claims for himself a non-Jewish Jesus, who is distinctively Asian. But this Jesus has no truck with that out-of-date nation Israel. Indeed, this Jesus’ incarnation is not at all for the lost sheep of Israel.

Yet another instance of rebellion against the particular is the wholesale changes made in public documents, whether recording births, marriages, children, and so on. In each of these cases, woke idealogy seeks to deny those inalienable qualities which establish the meaning of people and families. For example, the change of forms which designate “mother” or “father” are condemned as superfluous. Anyone can be a father. Mothers can be male. A family doesn’t need complementary sexes to function as a family.

In each of these cases, war is waged against that which is particular and unique. Female-only and male-only realities are the enemy of a cultural movement which values “function” over “person.” There is no “being a family”; all one need do is to function like a family, which simply requires people sufficient to the tasks.

What is revealed in this controversy is a cultural bias which privileges what is generic or undefined, , and views with contempt that which is particular and unique. The modern self, from its point of view, cannot be so limited. And this points us to a curious observation: that in our present moment, where we find ourselves is the source of struggle and despair, or it is the source of reflection, learning, action, and growth.

God and Our Places

The Bible offers us a fascinating story of people and their places. At the creation, the place given to Adam and Eve is a garden, which they are to keep, obeying God’s word which forbade the fruit of one particular tree. When the first pair did violate God’s word and eat of the forbidden fruit, one of the prices paid was the loss of the place God had provided. They are forbidden to return, and now face a life of struggle which will end in death.

When Cain kills his brother Abel, God’s judgment includes banishment from the company of his family. Cain makes the best of it, founding a city which he named for his son.

One of the early places of concentration is Shinar, where the descendants of Cain set themselves to build a tower to heaven, whose point is “to make a name for ourselves.” But this comes to nothing but God’s judgment; and in the end, it is God who determines the times and seasons and boundaries of the early nations. This is what Paul affirms in his speech at the Areopagus (Acts 17:11ff):

And he made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and boundaries of their dwelling place.

An early conclusion we can draw from these texts is that our places are God’s places bequeathed to us out of his sovereign wisdom and grace. We affirm that “the earth is the Lord’s, and all that dwells therein.” We know that “He changes times and seasons; he removes kings and sets up kings.” (Daniel 2:21)

But can we also make the assertion that the “places” where God puts us are not only geographic, but circumstantial and situational? This is indeed what Scripture affirms. The Bible testifies that Israel’s exile into Babylon was such a “place”. The cross is the determined end of Jesus’ life and ministry, a reality so painful that he sweat drops of blood while praying. And of course, the cross becomes the model of service for believers; and the cross became, for many, the outcome of their faithfulness to Christ.

This is the biblical framework which operates in my mind as I face challenges to my health, one after another. There is no knowing whether the most recent one is the last one. Only time will reveal that. But there is no escaping the fact that for every downturn, setback, and disaster, the place created by the events beyond my control is uniquely God’s, and uniquely mine. Though entirely ignorant of the fact, I was fitted for them. For the moment, God has me here and nowhere else. And I’m learning what that means for me.