Where we go, and don’t go, has a significant impact on our lives.
Reflect for a moment on how your attendance at a few key locations has shaped your own life. Whether or not the moment seemed significant at the time, looking back we can clearly see the gravity. This is further evidenced in the questions we often ask after a mistake: Why did I go there? Why didn’t I just go home?
The truth is, the places we choose to go, as much as the people we elect to spend our time with, have a profound impact on us. Places, like people, possess their own standards of conduct, positive and negative, that we subconsciously align to when present. This produces the positive effect of blending us into a variety of situations effectively, but is equally dangerous if we aren’t discerning about them. For unchecked, this same chameleon ability can lead us far from the person we ever intended to become.
“How well God must like you— you don’t hang out at Sin Saloon,
you don’t slink along Dead-End Road,
you don’t go to Smart-Mouth College.”
Even several millennia removed from the author of this Psalm, we can still readily bin the adverse locations we spend our time at into these categories. Such is the timeless nature of wisdom. And I’ll take it one step further and assert that we must be discerning about where we spend our time mentally and electronically in addition to physically. Virtual interactions produce tangible effects.
This isn’t to say we ought to keep our heads down and only transit between our homes, work, and church, keeping our phones hidden away. For Jesus traveled and interacted at many questionable locations, with many undesirable people. The difference is he did so actively and went into those situations with intention. In my own life I can attest that I often make said exceptions for personal gain and attempt to generate justification on the backend. I submit then our application is to remain vigilant, discerning, and active in where we choose to spend our time, understanding the effects, positive and negative, that will manifest in our lives.
How much better off might we be if this Psalm truly described us? Let us audit the locations, physical, mental, and electronic in which we spend our time this week with a critical eye, and ask if we are actively becoming the person we want to be, or just meandering.