Point of reference
Like Adam, we may end up treating God as if God were at the periphery. But where there is no center—or where we become the center—the circumference of life disappears.
When the train I was taking into Chicago’s Union Station stopped about 500 yards short of the platform, most of us on board took it in stride. We thought it was a momentary delay. It turned out to be 15 minutes long, which is the rough equivalent of eternity for a frantic commuter.
A cheer went up in our car at around ten minutes. We thought we were finally moving. The joke was on us, however, when we realized that it was only the train beside ours that was moving—in the opposite direction. It is a strange sensation to discover you are going nowhere when everything in your brain is telling you otherwise. What tipped us off to our foolishness was a reference point: a large brick building that came into view after the other train had passed.
All of us have reference points in our lives that provide us with our daily bearings. We might call these organizing centers, because they tend to possess generative qualities that fuel life, create meaning, and offer us a sense of place. Because these centers are fixed, they help us gain critical orientation in an often chaotic world.
