sacred space: God created man and woman and put them in a garden paradise — a sacred space called Eden. This is the idea of Shalom. Shalom not only means peace but the peace of God as was experienced in Eden. It was to be set a part from the rest of the uninhabited world. Here they were to enjoy intimate fellowship with the Lord God Himself! God put the man in this place for him to guard it from the intrusion of evil. And as an act of worship and in obedience they were to expand this sacred place to cover the whole earth.
May our hearts and our homes be the sacred place of shalom where we experience the beauty of God and then during the week expand His Shalom into our world full of "thorns and weeds". "guard your heart above all else for from it flows the springs of life - proverbs 4:23
sacred space — lost in space: our sacred space was lost due to the "fall" where evil penetrated the garden and into the heart of the man and the woman. They swallowed The Lie. Instead of being "like God" as the evil one promised, we return to dust — from glory to dust! Humanity is born outside of this sacred fellowship and we struggle. We have been struggling ever since to have it once again. we have an insatiable appetite for the sacred. We search, we thirst, we crave identity, significance, meaning and purpose in all of the wrong places: money; sex; fame; adventure; . . . All good things but when good things become ultimate things they become bad things. As C.S. Lewis has remarked, "we have settled for mud puddles when God is offering us the ocean." We are run ragged. We covet but always left - empty. we are broken —cracked buckets that leak. We have lost our way and the awful sad thing is that we don't even know it. Now, nothing is sacred and we are miserable for it - we are dust in the wind. "There is a way that seems right to a man but the end there of is the way of death." proverbs 14:12
