Not Hollow, but Hallowed Spaces

Life in Christ isn't found in empty spaces. Life in our Savior is found through "hearing" His word and having faith about His word. It's the faith we bring to an empty space that blesses the Holy Spirit to rejoice there. And it's the faith that we bring to a space that dedicates it to Heaven for as long as we are there.

a church in Tombstone, Arizona

Maybe the history of faith in a place sometimes makes the place more ready, in our hearts, for faith to return there. And maybe that's a little like the human soul.

Just think how even souls broken by dementia can sometimes commune with life again through the memory of a shared and sacred song.

"Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind," Jesus says in Matthew 22:37, reminding us of the need to be soulful, whole, and faithful: in prayer, in heart, in soul, in our places of meeting, in those places of communion we each have in the Holy Spirit.

Jesus also says of agreeing in times of trouble: "Where two or three gather in my name, there am I with them." (Matthew 18:20)

That's why some sacred spaces are thought of as sacred: because, there's that memory of hope, that memory of faithful gathering.

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Tombstone, Arizona, has become a little like a theme park, where re-enactments of old western gunfights are among activities the town stages for visitors — even though our faith in a Savior named Jesus draws us away from revisiting the iniquitous past in order to be entertained by that past.

Maybe some visitors to Tombstone want the thrill of up-close Western theater; but that's not a faithful want, and the thrill of it probably isn't something to cherish in heart.

One thing real to heart that has survived the ages at Tombstone is its churches, including at least two places of worship that Catholics and Episcopalians built in late-1800s.

That's remarkable, because Tombstone became so overcome by murder and crime at one point that a U.S. president almost ordered a military response. And, yet, the church remained, calling souls to Sunday school and to refuges from harm. Indeed, some homes became places of prayer.

So, while old western theater isn't a basis for the Heaven in our hearts, there can always remain a real foundation in Jesus in places where the past was deeply troubled. And maybe the truth of survival that some old churches can offer is the assurance that, wherever there's trouble in life, this trouble shall pass.

The gun-wielding old west gradually disappeared in the light of the few who found the narrow way to Heaven. Where two or three gathered in the name of Jesus, the money-lust, carousing, sexual hell, and other spiritual confusion of that violent day did eventually abandon the landscape.

And the hope that that past may offer today is that places of refuge in Jesus may continue to offer the light of life in times of trouble.


"Thy word is a lamp unto my feet, a light unto my path."
Psalm 119:105


"Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth."
1 Corinthians 13:6