Disoriented

Finding oneself in the center of a new and unfamiliar city can be disorienting.

On a visit with friends a couple of years ago to San Francisco—a beautiful city full of beautiful and welcoming features—a hotel concierge gave some “simple” directions from a hotel in the Embarcadero to where we could catch a trolly to Fisherman’s Wharf for some clam chowder in a sourdough bowl and an Anchor Steam.

 Unfortunately, a lot of the streets in that part of the city run diagonally, and apparently AT&T isn’t as major a cellular player on the West Coast as it in on the East, and so despite deploying four smartphones, we were soon four adults trying to get somewhere by committee, simply wandering to-and-fro with no sense of north, south, or east…or what we really needed, west.

We were disoriented and quite obviously tourists.

I bring this up because as the book of Hebrews reaches its climax in chapters 11 and 12, this week’s Epistle reading from the second half of chapter 12 points to a new and unfamiliar (and fairly major!) city we’re promised for the future, and of which, according to this passage, we’re already citizens.

It’s a city that’s both now and not yet. And if that’s not mind bending enough, this present/future city is also full of exciting and welcoming features that we might find, in a word, disorienting.

It ought to, however, have the opposite effect. We are, after all, locals.