My Place in the Circle

a continuation of the last blog

I have a place in the circle of life. Everyone does. As a young married wife, God could see my future even when I didn’t understand why we lived in a desert place. Loneliness filled me in those first months away from everything Kansas. Little did I know, nor would I have believed, that someday I would feel comfortable riding the trains and walking the streets of New York City, a place so unlike Kansas or Southern Idaho. God knew. He had a place for me then, and he does now.

After much sanctification, I’m learning to accept my placement in the circle. To my peers, it is a strange place. They would not want to live in an apartment where you never watch the sun rise. We don’t have the privilege of seeing a Kansas sunset. The relatives do not drop by. We do not go home for the holidays. Nor are we blessed to worship with a large congregation of saints.

It’s been a big adjustment for the girl who grew up in Central Kansas, surrounded by a loving family. Sunday dinners were spent with the cousins at our grandparents’ home. The farms and gardens of my childhood are far from this place. It would be easy to pine for what isn’t, but God wants me to be happy with what is. He chose this path for me. It led to this place in New York City, and not just anywhere in the city, but to an apartment in Queens on a certain street near to the hospital that employs my husband.

God knew we’d be here in the epicenter of the 2020 pandemic. He knew the nearby parks where we’d walk and that the ocean would only be a bus ride away. He saw that we’d worship in Harlem, and that my employer would be a man of God. God saw the craziness of this city. He knew that on my walk yesterday, a stranger would stop beside me and ask, “Why don’t the people here like the French?” (I didn’t know they didn’t.) God knew that the young men and we would reach the Yankee Metro-North Station last Sunday just as a game ended and that mobs of fans would fill the subway station. God saw. He knew that in that rowdy crowd, there was a place on the train for me.

God saw way down the road when, as a youth, I carnally wished for popularity. He knew that someday I would live in an alone place where I would be humbled by being a part of many nations and cultures. He knew we would never have children and that he would fill that void with a richness beyond what we could have imagined.

I look up from drinking Yemeni coffee in a Muslim shop this morning to see the words, “Every knee shall bow,” on a man’s t-shirt. It’s no accident that I am here. This is my place in the circle.

You too have a place in the circle. We all do. On the final day when every knee shall bow, I want to join you in the circle “in a better home awaiting in the sky, in the sky” (Ada R. Habershon).

Berniece