We put the roots. Then everything around us changed.

If you’ve moved recently (or tried) you’ll know there’s a shortage of available properties driving prices to all-time highs. Many potential buyers, including first-time buyers, have been priced out of the market and are stuck in places they would rather not be – and in some cases, places they no longer recognize.

It’s been nine years now since my husband and I bought our first home. After a decade of moving from place to place, we returned to his native Virginia to work in a rural community. Providence and desire have drawn us both, and the house we purchased has come to represent these things to us.

We quickly made our own, replaced the orange rug in the basement and updated the particleboard. We planted fruit trees and put them in the gardens. Then, fences and fences. We renovated the bathrooms and replaced the floors again when the drains broke and the basement flooded, all while we sank our roots deeper and deeper into the surrounding community.

Then earthquakes struck.

Not earthquakes in the literal sense of the word, but personal and professional earthquakes. Eight years later, we have moved on from the ministry that brought us here. Our children moved out of the elementary school which is a stone’s throw from our house, and we found ourselves feeling displaced even though we live at the same address.

Soon, global tremors surrounded the earthquakes. COVID-19 struck, and we and our neighbors found ourselves locked in our homes. Schools, churches and library closed too – our common community points are lost. Of course, we checked each other out, but at first, we didn’t know if our existence was more of a threat than a benefit.

My husband admitted a few months later, “I fell as if the ground was moving under my feet. Every time I try to take the next step, I lose my balance.” But at least now, we’ve had a strange kind of solidarity – our solidarity is no longer the only world shaking.

How do we continue when God calls us to stay the way we are? How can we survive in places that we feel are eroding?

After about 18 months, the aftershocks began to recede. We go out and try to re-establish life together. But a lot has changed. Church attendance is delayed, teachers and community leaders have retired early, and the library is still not fully open. Greater political divisions separated friends, and views once considered moderate are now considered “radical” by those who do not hold them.

We didn’t move. But the world has changed around us.

Suddenly my concept of place is being challenged, especially my belief that embracing your place can provide a rare source of stability in modern life. As someone who yearns, in the words of Wendell Berry, to be part of the “membership” of a place, this was a hard reality to accept. I thought setting the roots would provide permanence. But no one told me that earthquakes can uproot the strongest trees.

I still believe that the Lord’s providence defines the limits of where we live and when we live (Acts 26:17). I still think we should show up in the communities we’re put in. But I have a deep appreciation for life east of Eden, a world where our place can be shaken and disrupted. I now know that the ground under our feet should not be trusted – at least not with the stability of our souls.

How do we continue when God calls us to stay the way we are? How can we survive in places that we feel are eroding despite our attempts to stay rooted in them?

I’m still sorting this out. But I am learning that we must pay attention to the changes. We must tell the truth about them. We must tell the truth about the deep fault lines that existed long before the earthquake. We must tell the truth that they will pose dangers for generations to come. We also have to tell the truth that some places will never be the same again.

Sentimentalism is the special temptation of those of us who yearn for a place, and we should watch out for it. If the past few years have taught us anything, it is that the desire to live in the land of our imagination can change the course of history. We’ve also learned that the desire to make the Earth “great again” will find a special resonance in those places whose changing stories have been left uncensored and untelled.

But even as we mourn societies that will never be what they once were, we must also open ourselves up to the fact that some things need to change.

A recent study indicates that 29 percent of priests have considered leaving the service in the past year. Like their counterparts in other professions, many pastors wrestle with the course and sustainability of their work. Earthquakes have a way of leveling weak or poorly designed infrastructure, exposing deeper concerns that we may have overlooked during more stable times.

Reflecting on this, Reverend John Stark of New York City notes that “while the pandemic has certainly revealed what is precarious in our world and in the Church, it has also revealed what is absurd… [some] He was trying to build something that God did not intend to build. “

And so I wonder how work and life should change not despite the earthquake but because of it? What things need to be knocked down to make room for new possibilities?

Talking about the challenges churches face in emerging from the pandemic, Kate Chelnut writes, “What it’s like to struggle on top of struggles can be an opportunity for the church to live up to its ideals, take good care of each other and look to God in their suffering.”

But more than anything else at this moment, I find myself learning to hope – to believe that even as the earthquake recreates a place this place can still hold the possibilities and the calling.

Years before moving into our current home, my husband and I moved to Hook Bay, New Zealand, for a short-term ministerial position. We lived in a borrowed house next to sheep fields and all the way through vineyards and apple orchards.

An especially fertile area, Hawke’s Bay is known for its rich history of seismic activity, and every year the city of Napier celebrates the anniversary of the 1931 earthquake. The 7.8-magnitude event was, and remains, New Zealand’s deadliest natural disaster. Churches and schools collapsed. Houses were set on fire and destroyed. Hundreds died and thousands were injured.

Eventually, Napier was rebuilt in its signature Art Deco style, and the city’s architecture became world famous, attracting tens of thousands to an annual festival. But something else happened. The same earthquake that struck Napier caused its expansion, lifting nearly 40 square kilometers (about 10,000 acres) of viable property from the ocean. Today, if you fly into Hawke’s Bay Airport, your plane’s wheels will land on land reclaimed from the sea.

Because there is one more thing: in the New Testament, earthquakes accompany God’s work of redemption at the end of the world (Matthew 27:51-54). They open graves (Matthew 28:2), break chains and open prison doors (Acts 16:26). Perhaps more than anything else, they point to the presence of God somewhere (Acts 4:31).

At this moment, we must find new ways of being in places we haven’t left. But after being stripped of our little dreams for the places we call home, we can dream all over again. Even as we persevere in a scene that seems strange to us, that is familiar and unknown at the same time, we are encouraged that God is “our refuge and strength, a constant help in troubles…

We are not afraid, even if the earth recedes and the mountains fall into the heart of the sea, even if its waters roar and foam and the mountains shake with their gusts. (Psalm 46:1-3)

Instead of looking for a place, whether it is new or old, we look at the person. Because when our places around us change–when we can’t recognize our communities, our state, our churches–God does not. And it is his devotion that allows us to continue faithfully in the places we might prefer to leave – and not only to survive but to find contentment and joy in them. We remember that we were strangers and only pilgrims on this earth in the beginning.

And from this place, we can go on to that better country that awaits us – to that kingdom that cannot be shaken.

Hannah Anderson is the author of Made for More, All That Good, and Humble Roots: How Humility Builds and Nourishes Your Soul.

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