“What you see and hear depends a good deal on where you are standing,” C.S. Lewis wrote in The Magician’s Nephew. As an author, Lewis must have known this was doubly true.
I once heard a novelist talk about making the setting work for the story, giving the example of The Help, which is set in racist hotspot 1960s Mississippi instead of 1990s Wisconsin or some other lesser-known era and location.
I hadn’t thought about that before, but it’s true: where the story happens matters.
In Lewis’ own The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, the Pevensie children were not living at home when they stumbled upon the secret world of Narnia. The four siblings probably felt homesick and maybe even orphaned, having been sent away from battle-weary London to a quiet house in the country. Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy had witnessed what war and its affects, and they would soon find themselves in battles of their own in Narnia.
The setting of the story is important.
Our own settings in our own stories
Where are we today, right now? Big city? Small town? Hometown? Moving often? Overseas? Our location isn’t a sidenote—it’s the undercurrent of our story. Where we are is the basis for each of our stories, and a significant part of what God is doing in us.
But ‘where we are’ is more than just where we live. Where do we work? What church do we call ours? We are shaped by local events and priorities, neighbors and community celebrations, even the weather and geography.
Abby Sunderland’s dreams of sailing around the world were fueled by her years of living on a sailboat with her family. Rifqa Bary’s story of living in danger because of her Christian faith stands out because she lived in Ohio, not some restrictive country in the Middle East. Abby Johnson’s Unplanned is a pro-life turning point unique because it took place in a Planned Parenthood clinic (that same clinic was later turned into headquarters for the pro-life group across the street). Martin and Katharina Luther’s love story is significant because the two had formerly lived in a monastery and a convent—a scandalous match, at the time.
All of these life stories would have been different if Abby, Rifqa, Abby, Martin, or Katharina lived or worked somewhere else.
Where we are matters in our own story, for at least two reasons.
God is in control
The world was shocked in January 1956, as the first photos of the five slain missionaries circulated. The Auca Five, as they came to be known, had been speared to death while trying to make peaceful contact with an unreached Stone Age tribe in Ecuador.
Decades later, Steve Saint still wrestled with his father’s death, and he had begun to come to the conclusion that it was hardly more than a sad, unfortunate coincidence.
During his travels for Mission Aviation Fellowship, Steve came to Timbuktu, Mali, a city known mostly for its remote location. He was soon directed to a cheerful man named Nouh, who shared his testimony, including the suffering he had received from his people and even his own family.
Randy Alcorn writes about what happened next.
“Where did your courage come from?” Steve asked.
“The missionary gave me books about Christians who’d suffered for their faith. My favorite was about five young men who risked their lives to take God’s good news to stone-age Indians in the jungles of South America. The book said they let themselves be speared to death, even though they had guns and could have killed their attackers!”
Stunned at these words, Steve said, “One of those men was my father.”
Steve realized that God had used the story of his father’s death to encourage believers as far away as Timbuktu. Eventually, Steve’s embrace of God’s purpose in his family’s hardship freed Steve to work among the same people who killed his father years before.
God works everywhere. There are no unimportant, overlooked, or too-remote places. The Lord is “a great king over all the earth” (Psalm 47:2), including our little corner of it.
God put us here for a purpose
Corrie ten Boom worked in forced labor in Ravensbruck, the concentration camp where her sister eventually died. Corrie once overhead Betsie telling the other prisoners that God had made a blueprint for each of their lives, and including a section that said, “Ravensbruck.”
How Corrie wondered why God would choose a place like that overcrowded, gruesome concentration camp, though Betsie seemed convinced that God had a good purpose.
“We must tell people what we have learned here,” Betsie whispered to Corrie. “We must tell them that there is no pit so deep that He is not deeper still. They will listen to us, Corrie, because we have been here.”
Betsie died the next day. But her prediction was correct: because of Corrie’s experience in the agony of a concentration camp, millions of people have been changed by their story. Without Ravensbruck she would have never have been able to tell so many people that “there is no pit so deep that He is not deeper still.”
We don’t have a concentration camp in our story, but God’s sovereignty stands just as true in our lives as in Corrie’s and Betsie’s, and our place in the world and time in history are no accident.
Betsie was right. God has a blueprint of each of our lives, and every place marked on it is there for a reason, whether we can see that reason or not.
In such a place as this
Thousands of years ago, Mordecai the Jew urged his niece Esther to make a difficult choice. “Who knows whether you have not come to the kingdom for such a time as this?” he asked.
The last few months have made it obvious that we live in momentous, significant times. Our places may not feel that way, but where we are is no less purposeful than when we are.
God has put us here for this time, specifically. But He has also put us here. For a reason. We won’t be in this place forever. Maybe, for some of us, we’ll find ourselves in some other equally-important place very soon. But right now we’re here. And where we are matters.
