Standing on holy ground

One of the blessings of moving to a new country is discovering the different cultures of your new homeland. One of Estonia’s lovely customs is the respect guests show when entering your home by removing their shoes. It’s normal practice that when you enter a home you take your shoes off and leave them by the door. I’ve certainly been checking my socks more carefully when getting dressed in the morning! This courtesy extends beyond friends and house guests. We’ve recently had service engineers visit from the telecoms company. Their first task has been to remove their shoes. This week we located our prospective doctors and went along to register.  On entering the surgery we were confronted with a shoe rack (on which to place our shoes) or a basket of plastic shoe bags for us to put on over our shoes – like the ones you see forensic teams wearing at crime scenes! These are all new experiences for us but seem to show a healthy respect for the homes and properties of others – unless it’s simply an irrational over sensitivity to the risk of germs, of course :-)

Either way, on numerous occasions my mind has strayed to the famous story of Moses and his meeting with God, recorded in Exodus 3. Confronted with the miraculous sight of a flaming bush that was not burning, up Moses turned to take a closer look. From out of the bush God spoke a warning, ‘Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.’ Despite Moses’ fears about his youthfulness and inadequacy, God called him into service and promised His presence for the incredible spiritual journey that would follow.  That ‘holy ground’ experience set the seal upon a lifetime of ministry and spiritual leadership.

This week it has been our joy to meet our new Territorial Leaders, Colonels Johnny and Eva Kleman. We’ve thoroughly enjoyed their company and found their personal ministry to us to be caring, thoughtful and inspirational. It will be a joy to work with them and we look forward to their leadership of our formal installation ceremony at Kolpi corps tomorrow. Following the meeting we will have our first fellowship with the Region’s officers and centre leaders. During worship we plan to sing Geron Davis’s lovely song based on that Exodus 3 story, ‘We are standing on holy ground, and I know that there are angels all around. Let us praise Jesus now. We are standing in His presence on holy ground’.  We appreciate that there may be some natural reservation as colleagues meet us for the first time but we pray that our first moments of fellowship might be blessed by a real sense of God’s presence.

Loksa camp

Inspecting the rooms

A few days ago Lyn and I took our small office team (Kerlin, Evelyn and Shelby)and visited Loksa, the site of our Regional camp. We had heard much about this place, for many years the venue for a regular summer camp programme; the location for men’s, women’s, sport, musicians, Home League, children’s , pensioners and many other varieties of camp! We didn’t quite know what to expect. Would Loksa be a smaller version of the wonderful camp facilities we had visited in America (Echo Grove, Hoblitzel and others)? Would it resemble the ramshackle ‘Blue Peter’ huts at Sunbury? As you can see from the pics the property is a large house, once rather stately and grand but now, very sadly, rather run down and ‘tired’. The water supply is broken so the bathrooms and toilets have a unique aroma (!), the grounds are overgrown, the beds and furniture covered with a layer of dirt and dust, fridges sprouting blossoming mould and spiders having a great time spinning cobwebs. Rooms that must have echoed over the years with the sounds of laughter and fun now stand eerily quiet, looking run down and, speaking frankly, quite sad. As we moved from room to room inspecting the property I sensed a similar sadness descending on Evelyn. She told us about the great camps she had enjoyed over a number of years, the moments of fun, the friendships made and the

Loksa beach - nice, eh? Not a bad spot
for an office outing. Take off your shoes -
you are standing on holy ground!

spiritual high points enjoyed. This place had been so significant in her personal journey of faith; holy ground in the life of a young Salvationist. We have some big decisions to make. Do we try and raise the funds to restore Loksa to a viable standard? Do we scale back the camp programme in future and have one or two weeks each year in a rented, professional facility? Not an easy decision.

In penning this week’s rambling thoughts I draw these experiences together and reflect with thankfulness on those times and places when I have stood on holy ground. Sometimes those moments have come in elaborate worship buildings; other ‘holy ground’ moments have happened in refugee camps or the ruined homes of disaster survivors. While I treasure those ‘special places’ I thank God that His unique, healing and empowering presence is not constrained by structure.  It’s quite ironic that as Solomon dedicated the most ornate Temple that it was possible to build, he had to confess, ‘Even heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain you, much less this house that I have built! (1 Kings 8:27). The challenge – I guess – is to make the time, grasp those occasional opportunities, or simply be sensitive to those ‘holy ground’ moments when we become aware of His presence and feel that, even metaphorically, removing our shoes is the very least we can do. Wherever you might worship or gather today I pray the sensing of God’s presence might be a personal reality.