Your Environment Matters

Cities can shape your spiritual identity. You don’t need to have the perfect quiet setting to understand yourself. You don’t need endless amounts of reflection. Where you are right now—in a city, at your job, with your crazy ass family—all can work toward shaping you.

It is through the circumstances and challenges of the city that we can greater recognize that God wants to help us to be more loving, caring, generous, and committed to the health and thriving of our cities.

Why?

When you live in a city, you are more regularly forced to interact with people who are better than you. They are kinder, wiser, and deeper than you.

Cities are full of people who push us to think longer and harder about what we’re made of—our personal character, right, and wrong. Ultimately, for the Jesus follower, we should be led to recognize that we do not have the ability to become better without God’s supernatural help.

If you are a religious person, ask yourself: how will God use my city—my neighborhood, my workplace, my home—to teach me how to be more spiritually connected and vibrant?

If you want to read more, check out Center Church by Tim Keller. I totally stole this entire idea from him.