All are yours

"All things are yours, whether Paul or Apollos or Cephas or the world or life or death or the present or the future-all things are yours" (1 Corinthians 3:21-22).

I don't know if you're like me and entertain inconsequential running arguments in your head. One of mine is that I keep trying to decide whether at heart I am a country girl or a city girl or a suburb girl. The question is completely immaterial, yet I often ponder it as if it were something I need to settle.

When I am in the countryside, I am in love with wide-open spaces, luscious sunsets, and the fantasy of a few salt-of-the-earth, lifelong neighbors in farmer jeans. When I am in the city, I am in love with the energy and the slant of sun through mammoth Corinthian columns. The suburbs-where I really live when I am not Walter Mitty-means to me impulsive forays into the corner store for an ice cream sandwich with my granddaughter after the playground.

Another useless private preoccupation, somewhat related to the aforementioned, is one I engaged in on a recent jaunt to New York City. As I walked down Fifth Avenue, I had it in my head that I do not belong here and that this is not my city; it belongs to all these other people who are passing me on the sidewalk. I am an interloper. This meditation was just barely conscious but bathed my entire perspective in a slight discomfort: This town is not mine.

Truth be told, I have always carried around the idea that I am not even a true "Glensidian"-because I have lived here only 35 years, being a transplant from Rhode Island. I am the new kid, the foreigner.

Suddenly I thought of Paul's words in 1 Corinthians 3, and they transformed my outlook. They transformed it with the truth, and not with another subjective feeling. The fact is-the God-spoken reality is-that New York City is mine. It is as much mine as it is the cabbie's and the guards' at the Empire State Building. Who says this is not my city when God says, "All things are yours"?

The countryside is mine too, as well as the mom-and-pop store in Glenside. This is a joyful epiphany somehow. Once you realize that God is your Father, and the owner of every skyscraper, red barn, and Home Depot, it dispels your ridiculous fears and alienation. True, we are pilgrims and not yet home. But in the meantime, every inch of the planet is our Father's, and we are his children, and can move about in it with confidence.

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