Treasures, Part IV

 My worship corner at home

"Don't hoard treasure down here where it gets eaten by moths and rust, or--worse!--stolen by burglars.  Stockpile treasure in heaven, where it's safe from moths and rust and burglars.  It's obvious, isn't it?  The place where your treasure is, is the place you will most want to be, and end up being."  Matthew 6:19-21 (Message)

In this series I've been thinking about treasures. I'm not the sort of person that collects a lot of trinkets that I'd be unwilling to get rid of.  I've moved enough times in my life to understand that "the fewer the possessions to transfer, the fewer things you get attached to, the better."  Besides, missionary kids have been noted by the researchers for treasuring their relationships as "home," rather than assigning the emotions of "home" to possessions that get lugged around.

So I can pat myself on the back, as might you, that my treasures are few, and those are valued because they symbolize relationships with people I love, rather than things, per se.  God's not asking us to give up our attachments to those relationships, is He?  He was talking about materialistic people, right?  He can't be asking us fix our hearts only on "treasure in heaven" in all ways, including our interpersonal connections!

You may be expecting to hear me say, "Wrong," to the above questions, but I'm not going to. I do believe that the godly way life is to value connections with one another, to assign meaning to those intangible ways in which we bring each other joy through community.

What I've wondered about, as I meditated on the passage above and on my few treasures, was whether I have any things that symbolize the value I put on the connection I have with God.  I don't have a "God piano," or a "God set of e-mails" or a "God quilt."  I do have a collection of years and years of worship journals, but frankly, I just can't see myself sitting down and reading through them with the enjoyment I have when I reread the first year of e-mails between me and Husband.  Is that bad? I have mulled it over for some time since I thought of the concept of treasures being symbols of relationship.  Some people have a rosary, or a cross of some sort.  But I come from a church that tends to avoid symbols like these in a well-intentioned effort to lift the heart away from things and to God himself.

A thought has taken shape as I've pondered these things.  I have concluded, at least for the time being, that my treasures that symbolize connection to God are places.

For me, these are the places where my thoughts quiet down and my inner ears become open.  They are places where I have spent time alone, and where I have plowed through some pretty significant inner stuff as I prayed--often without words.  They are places like the worship amphitheater at a summer camp where I worked as a college student.  My room looking out into a Finnish forest at a school where I worked for a year at the age of 22.  My couch by the picture window in my little house in the woods, up on a hill above the Napa Valley in California.  The beach at Lincoln City, Oregon.  My worship corner by the window in our bedroom at home, where I'm writing this.  These are all precious treasures.  And they can't be stolen, or get moth-eaten, or rust, because they exist as much in memory as in reality.

Hmmm.

Do you have any treasures that symbolize a connection to God?  I'd be interested in hearing about them.