There’s not much of a difference between anywhere and nowhere. Anywhere is generic, indistinguishable from all other places, so you might as well be nowhere in particular. But to be somewhere is to have a sense of place, unique from all other places. When you are somewhere, you are not anywhere else.
I think the difference between anywhere and somewhere is being wanted, and being wanted is what it is to be loved. True love ignores the promises of “this could be anything” and desires the something that is given. When a place is wanted for what it is, when it is loved, it transforms into somewhere.
Laura Griffin is an artist with a profound love of place. She is an interior designer with an eye for beauty in broken places. She does not walk into spaces and merely see endless possibility, or think that a space could simply be “anywhere.” Her love of place allows spaces to be what they are, brokenness and all. For her, plying her trade means enacting the story of redemption.
One of the projects Laura has worked on has impacted me, and so many I love, in ways I struggle to put into words. I think it’s best to let her words speak here:
Laura loves places because she loves people. I remember praying with Laura as she grieved over a lost and hurting loved one. I think her tears bore witness to the fact that she sees those little “nooks and crannies” in people. Those broken places “sing” to her. She longs to see the beauty of redemption in others, because she knows the Lord has seen it in her. When a person is loved, like a place, he or she is transformed from an anyone into a someone. She knows that Christ did not create a generic “anyone” in her, but is transforming her into a unique and beautifully broken someone because he loves her. She knows he is working with someones like her to build his dwelling place, a very specific, unique somewhere. That somewhere is his church, a people formed for his glory who live out the story of redemption before a lost world desperate for somewhere to belong.
Anywhere is for anyone, but somewhere is for someones. It’s the love that she has for the someones that moves her to create somewhere for them; a place defined by them and designed for them.
Jesus never looks at people as mere blank slates that could be “anyone.” He works with what is given. As Laura said, “He didn’t make a whole new person; he took what was old, and made it new.”
Thank you Laura, for loving us someones so dearly that you helped us create a beautifully restored somewhere, where the story of redemption plays out in the lives of His beautifully broken people.
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