Disorienting

Finding oneself in the center of a new an unfamiliar major city can be extraordinarily disorienting. I mean, just try to navigate Edinburgh, Scotland—a city in which nothing is straight, or straightforward—without something like Google Maps. Fun fact: the setting for Diagon Alley from the Harry Potter series is an actual normal street there, so...

I bring this up because this week’s Epistle reading from the second half of Hebrews 12 points to a new and unfamiliar (and fairly major!) city we’re promised for the future, and also of which according to this passage, we’re already locals…or should be.

It’s a city that’s both now and not yet. And this present/future city is also full of breathtaking and welcoming features that we might find bewildering and overwhelming…in a word, disorienting.

It ought to, however, have the opposite effect. Rather than disorient us, it ought to orient us to our true home…to something both material and eternal.