The 24 Rhythms of Hearth & Hinterland: Reclaiming Forgotten Places
Words on our call to remember, restore, and repent for making desolate what God created as good.
There Are No Unsacred Places
There’s an ongoing temptation to divide the world into the sacred and the temporal, into things that matter and things that don’t.
We measure worth by form and function. We rank space by perceived utility, by economic investment, market value, historical significance, human intent, and nostalgia. We build our lives toward the ends of comfort and economic benefit, forgetting that sacredness has never been bound to our benefit or convenience.
If there’s a central conviction to our call and rhythm to reclaim forgotten places, it’s found in the prophetic words of Wendell Berry:
“There are no unsacred places; there are only sacred places and desecrated places.”
But human desecration doesn’t cancel sanctity. It only covers it in the dust of our ruined ambition until we forget what the Creator never does.
The problem isn’t that God left.
The problem is that we stopped caring to look for the divine in places (and people) we don’t see as personally valuable.
Drawing Lines Where God Never Did
Humanity is really good at drawing hard lines between what is holy and what is expendable, what we believe is lasting and what is temporary.
We build ornate sanctuaries and then turn our backs on cracked sidewalks.
We bless our communion tables of our spiritual community while ignoring the empty kitchen tables in our neighborhood community.
We praise the beauty and wonder of the Created earth in our praise and worship and then pave over that divine reminder with our parking lots and Walmarts.
We call that progress. We box the divine spark that flows through all of creation into buildings we build to contain the glory of God and act surprised when it shows up and calls out to us from the very places we’ve written off as godforsaken and destitute.
But we serve a Creator who doesn’t honor our categories. A Creator that never has.
The God of scripture is always showing up in the most ruined, unremarkable, and seemingly blasphemous places culture can imagine.
He shows up in deserts and wilderness. He is revealed in burning bushes. He finds his way through muddy riverbanks. Forgotten fig trees. Small, backwater hamlets and the blasphemed Samaria.
Jesus wasn’t born to the nobility of Rome or Jerusalem. He made His home in Nazareth. He broke bread with the poor. He gathered disciples in fishing towns that never made the maps. And when He was raised from the dead, the first person He spoke to was a woman that Jewish culture had learned to overlook and tune out.
We scoff at the obvious folly of those people in scripture, but we still do it in our own lives in the present.
We still overlook people and places.
We still expect the Creator to focus blessings into the people, places, and cultural behaviors we deem righteous and deserving.
When we box God into our value system, we become complicit in a lie that some things are worth saving and restoring while others aren’t. That some neighborhoods deserve our investment of time, attention, and dollars, while others don’t. That some of creation should be honored and preserved because it’s valuable to our devices and economy, and the rest can be strip-mined for parts and pleasure.
That some things are worth the trouble and others should be left to chaos until they’re needed again.
But the whole narrative of Christian scripture and the gospel of Jesus doesn’t work like that.
The gospel of Jesus teaches us that resurrection is possible in the very places we’ve already written off. Ezekiel speaks the breath of God into forsaken land so the old bones can breathe again. The places made desolate by sin, greed, or abandonment are still part of the story God is telling and we are not free to forget them because those are the places he seems to most enjoy making his presence known. Or perhaps, they are the places that most remember that it is only through divine providence that we are standing at all.
The Witness of Nehemiah
The prophet Nehemiah didn’t forget. He had every reason to stay in the comfort afforded him as a cupbearer. He had access. He had power. A front-row seat at the king’s table. But when word reached him that the walls of Jerusalem had been reduced to rubble, something in him broke.
He offered his thoughts and prayers. He wept and cried out to God. And then he let that anguish move him to action.
He didn’t start by issuing a public decree. He didn’t gather a team of visionaries to brainstorm strategies. He rode out at night and walked the ruins himself.
Quietly.
Patiently.
Letting his own heart absorb the truth before asking anyone else to act.
And when he did speak, it wasn’t with any sort of grandiose self-ambition. It was with solidarity.
“You see the trouble we’re in… Come, let us rebuild.”
That’s where reclamation, restoration, and true repentance and reconciliation begins — not with marketing language or branded campaigns, but with relational, shared lament and community vision.
We walk the ruins at night.
We listen first.
And then we roll up our sleeves and respond to the unique shadows and opportunities we’ve uncovered.
To reclaim a forgotten place, you have to love it enough to learn its wounds.
And respond from a position of relational intimacy not distance.
Restoration as Theological Justice
I believe this kind of reclamation of forgotten, desolate spaces is one of the clearest ways we continue the work of creation.
The Genesis call — to tend and to keep — isn’t just about stewardship of green space, though it certainly is that. It’s about the kind of creative labor that restores dignity to a place and people. It heals what the spirit of human empire breaks. It rethreads the fabric of belonging in places where it’s come unraveled.
This is justice work.
But not just political justice, though it is. Not just social justice, though it is. Not just economic or racial or ecological justice, though it very much is.
This is theological justice.
But not in the sense that this is about correcting or aligning ourselves with a certain way of thinking about God. What I mean is that this is a justice that predates human history. It is a justice that weaves itself though everything that is created.
It is the logos, the very Word of creation … the same Word that was manifested in Jesus Christ.
But reclaiming what has been lost and forsaken, we unite ourselves and our lives with the same work that Jesus Christ taught and modeled during his ministry in the Levant over two thousand years ago.
It asks us to believe that God is not limited to the places that still look “whole.” It is not limited to our ideas of right and wrong. It is not even bound by the Christian religion.
It calls us to participate in the healing of the land and the people — to treat restoration not as a project, but as a posture.
Theologian Willie James Jennings says it this way, that the “deformed imagination” of empire must be replaced by a “holy joining.” That the Christian call is not to escape the ruins, but to inhabit them with resurrection in our hands.
Showing Up Without a Strategy
Any type of spiritual vision requires patience. The Creator works on a timeline that is often uncomfortable and wholly unsatisfactory to our human conception of time and space. It always means choosing holy presence over human performance. In this case, it means tending to forgotten places even when the metrics don’t make sense, even when the grant doesn’t come through, even when the pews and workshops are left half-empty, even when the town says, “Why bother?”
We move ahead because we remember what our empires are ready to forget.
We walk on because we believe that the Spirit still walks the unpaved paths.
We keep speaking because we believe Christ still breaks bread at unwatched tables.
We keep building because we believe the Creator still weeps for the land we’ve left behind.
The Scriptural and Sacred Imagination
Christian scripture is full of promises that the Creator hears the cries of the forgotten and oppressed and restores the ruins of desolation.
Isaiah said the people of God would be known as “repairers of the breach, restorers of streets to dwell in.”
Amos declared that God would rebuild the ruined cities and replant the vineyards.
Luke opens with Jesus saying, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me… to proclaim good news to the poor… to set the oppressed free.”
And John tells us the Word didn’t float above us, it dwelt among us. It tabernacled. It took on the shape of its place like a particular skin.
That means if we want to follow Jesus, we’d better start paying attention to the places where He still dwells. We better start paying attention to the places he’s put us.
Not the cleaned-up places we would rather move to.
The broken ones.
The ones everyone moved out of.
Not the stories we’ve already shared.
The ones everyone else would like to silence.
The Real Work of Reclamation
It is frustrating how frequently and quickly talk of restoring a place turns to returning it to its former “hey-day”, the time when it was most useful and appealing to the ambitious and well-to-do.
Reclaiming forgotten places doesn’t mean we work to restore them to how they used to be. This isn’t about nostalgia.
Working in forgotten places means helping them become what they were always meant to be.
Justice and hope isn’t about restoring the dignity of a place by making it what we once created it to be. Justice and hope is about restoring the dignity of a place by making it what the Creator created it to be.
It’s about restoring balance.
It’s about restoring honor.
It’s about restoring livability.
This doesn’t always require a nonprofit, a platform, or a grant. Sometimes it’s just one person with a broom and a key. Neighbors who keep showing up. A porch light that stays on. A church or community space that stays open twenty-four hours a day. A meal that gets cooked before anyone knows who’s coming.
Sometimes it’s just a willingness to say,
This ground is still sacred.
This story is still worth telling.
This place still has breath in it.
Benediction of Behavior
This is my invitation to you, my call to embrace new rhythms that bring repentance and restoration to the forgotten places around you.
Stop believing that you can’t do the work.
Reclamation does not begin with money, though resources are nice to have when they are given freely. Reclamation doesn’t begin with the right credentials either necessarily.
It begins with presence.
It begins with memory.
It begins with the courage to look at what has been lost and refuse to call it worthless.
So pay attention.
To the street you’ve stopped noticing.
To the yard that hasn’t heard laughter in years.
To the voice in the meeting that always gets talked over.
To the church building that’s been empty for so long no one even prays for it anymore.
To the floodplain and the brownfield and the ravine.
To the hollow where the old folks still sit on plastic chairs under faded porch awnings.
Ask yourself — what’s still breathing under the ruin, and what would it mean to believe that resurrection might begin there?
Reclaiming forgotten places starts when we stop asking what a place can give us and start asking what it needs to become itself again. It starts with asking what we can give to it.
So sweep the steps.
Walk the alley.
Plant the native seeds.
Mend the fence without waiting for a permit.
Buy your produce from the guy who sets up beside the post office with a table and a tarp.
Call the elder who never left the neighborhood.
Light a fire in a place long cold and see who gathers.
Let your prayers become presence. Let your presence become practice.
Don’t wait for the system to catch up.
Don’t wait for the maps to change.
Don’t wait for someone else to remember.
You be the one who remembers.
You be the one who tends and keeps.
Because what was forgotten is not gone.
Because what was abandoned still bears God’s breath.
Because what was desecrated can be sanctified again.
And because there are no unsacred places, only those still waiting to be reclaimed by people with rooted feet, open hands, and a holy imagination.
May you have peace on your path and breath in your bones.
And courage enough to be the holy remembering.