The Power of Place

Place is a powerful thing. The first place most of us ever know is the arms of a parent. And maybe that is why, all our lives, we keep longing for a place that feels safe… a place that tells us we belong.

I recently answered a Table Topic in my Toastmasters meeting by talking about the place where I grew up. It was a tiny country church in North Texas, next to what was already a hundred-year-old cemetery. When I was a child, that church had no air conditioning. In winter, it was heated by two gas stoves, and the pews closest to the stoves were the prized seats. My two grandmothers sat in two of those prized pews every Sunday. My parents were there too, but they were usually busy — they might be leading the singing, or taking care of babies in the nursery.

Outside, there was a fifty-foot concrete table. Several times a year, it would be covered with dishes made in all those ladies’ kitchens. Ten or twenty children crawled, ducked, and ran between the table legs — and the ladies’ legs — while lunch was being set out. A scraped knee meant somebody scooped you up and hugged you. It did not matter whether she was your mother or your grandmother. In that place, arms and hugs were simply assumed.

As we got older and learned to read, we wandered through the cemetery reading gravestones. We would spot names we heard at home, and then hear the stories behind those lives.

It has taken me years to realize that what I remember so vividly is not just a location. It is a sense of place. This attachment to place is deeply human. Even now, when we uncover ancient sites — especially burial grounds — we treat them with great care. It reminds me of Genesis 23, where Abraham insists on securing a burial place for his wife Sarah. He wants the land to mean something. He wants memory to have a home.

But not everyone gets to experience place as something stable. For me, one of the most heartfelt parts of immigration is imagining what it means to be uprooted from your place. As of 2022, an estimated 11 million unauthorized immigrants were living in the United States. And when I think about that, my mind goes first not to policy, but to place. Maybe some never had a place like the one I knew as a child. Maybe they did — but it is no longer safe. Or maybe, like me, when I left North Texas for the Rocky Mountains, they were trying to make a new life and build a place of their own. Every one of those possibilities carries weight - and deserves its own carefully crafted policy.

But places do not stay the same. The old church building of my childhood is long gone, replaced almost forty years ago by my father’s - and my - generation. And now the long concrete table — the one that held all those dishes and all that fellowship — is lost, too. The neighborhood around the church and cemetery has changed. It is no longer mostly the descendants of those buried in the cemetery. It is newer families making lives of their own. I feel loss. I grieve the place that formed me. But I also know this is part of the human story. Places change because people change. The question is not "what change will come?". The question is "what will we choose to remember, protect, and carry with us."

The cemetery has chosen to remember the beauty of community fellowship by erecting a section of the old table inside the cemetery grounds. The church is being lovingly curated by a new congregation - into a place that makes sense to those new families.

So I have come to believe that place is not only something we are given. It is something we curate. I will always love the place that formed me. But my place now is also made of the people I love, the things I grow, and the things I keep learning. Even my hydroponic garden reminds me that roots can travel. Roots don’t always need ground to flourish. They can be moved, transplanted, and tended in new settings. Roots grow where care is given. My own sense of place is no longer limited to where I began. My place is the life I remember in that community, AND my place is the relationships I am carrying with me, AND my place is the life I am cultivating - and protecting - today.

Psalm 139