There’s a story in the Old Testament that you may or may not be familiar with.
A man named Moses is out tending sheep and God speaks to him, after drawing his attention by a burning bush. When Moses moves toward the bush, God says to him, “Do not come any closer. Take off your sandals, for the place where you are standing is holy ground.”
God makes Moses aware that this place is to be revered because God’s Spirit is present. This makes it a sacred space. He then gives Moses a vision for the beautiful, powerful things he will do in the world because God will be with him.
A few thousand years later in the New Testament, a traveling pastor named Paul writes to his church in Corinth, telling them that they are temples of the Holy Spirit, that God dwells within them, that they are living, breathing churches. He speaks encouragement into their lives, reminding them of God’s sacred presence and of what they will do in the world because of it.
You are holy ground.
You probably forget that from time to time. It’s easy to do.
The hurtful words people speak into our lives can stick. We can begin to wear the false labels they craft for us. We start to believe that we are the sum total of every nasty thing we’ve ever been told about who we are and what we’re worth. We let the world distract us.
Or sometimes this forgetting is an inside job. Our disappointments and flaws and mistakes, which are so very apparent to us, can begin to pile upon one another until they become the story we tell ourselves about our value, our beauty, our gifts.
Either way, most of us live with a really distorted image of ourselves. The recording that loops inside our heads is that we are frauds and failures; that we are undeserving of goodness or love or blessing, that our best days are behind us.
And so we lose the simple awe we are supposed to live with. We lose the reverence for our very grace-saturated lives—and we keep our shoes on all the time.
Maybe you needed a reminder that you are a living, breathing church housing glorious things.
You don’t need to be a religious person to believe this. You don’t need a faith tradition to consent to the fact that you are filled with promise and brilliance. It’s okay to admit these things. Doing so isn’t inflating your ego it’s accurately assessing your worth.
Today let your very breath remind you that your life is a sacred space.
Remember that you are defined not by what you do or fail to do, by what another says about you, or even what you say about yourself.
You are defined by your belovedness.
Take off your shoes, friend and live this day with the awe it deserves.
You are holy ground.
