Finding Place (and a mariachi band)

Sometimes a Friday night mariachi band makes you cry, because you know you’ve found your place (and you’ve wanted good cheese dip for quite a while).

And every Sunday after church, the burger place around the corner helps remind you of the gift of investment.

We’ve lived in Atlanta about 10 months now, and we’re finding our places.

We have a coffee shop, the place of reprieve and writing, the place for quiet hours of study.

And we go to parks, we walk the little lake, we stroll the historic cemetery that really feels like a botanical gardens.

We attend story time and accumulate overdue fines for the library books we just love too much.

And we worship all week long with a community of people who share heart and Spirit with us.

A few weeks ago, I saw this word on my notecard, the ones we used to help us sort through our time of contemplation in our Wednesday night small group.

I sat there asking myself what it means to invest, to dig my heart and energy into something or someone in my life.

I didn’t quite get it then, though I was really, really searching. But on Friday night, at the mexican restaurant up the road from our apartment, it finally clicked.

To invest in something, I’m claiming it, I’m calling it mine and receiving the good and bad things it may give back to me.

It was God, asking me to see it differently, to remember that some things take time, that some transitions start bringing fruit 10 months after the move.

So, I’m seeing it.

I’m sitting back and resting in the sight of my city, my town, the character she has and the people who make her unique.

I’m choosing to invest in this little community we’ve found, people that share our streets and sidewalks with us, that fill our buildings and hearts.

Even though we’re thread-bare tired and we’re begging for summer to whisk us away for a time, we have a place here.

Even though we tell ourselves we’re alone, and we get stuck looking inward– we have a place here.

It may take 10 months, it may take 2 weeks, but the act of investment is a thought-out action, a plan to commit, to serve, to joyfully live.

Right before we first moved here, I wrote about finding a mulberry tree, about the words God spoke to me about this mystery of a place we were about to spend over 5 years living in.

There is so much fruit here.

There is so much cultivation happening, so much sunshine and life-giving rain.

I’m digging in, especially on Friday nights at Coyote’s Mexican Restaurant, where three men sing La Cucaracha to my wide-eyed and music-adoring boys, and I cry because I’m safe and I’m home.