{"id":4670,"date":"2025-06-03T09:45:29","date_gmt":"2025-06-03T13:45:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/js1cd06kre.onrocket.site\/?p=4670"},"modified":"2025-06-03T09:45:29","modified_gmt":"2025-06-03T13:45:29","slug":"every-place-is-bethel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/2025\/06\/03\/every-place-is-bethel\/","title":{"rendered":"Every Place is Bethel"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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To listen to today’s reflection as a podcast,\u00a0<\/em>click here<\/a>

Many of life\u2019s most memorable spiritual moments seem to come out of nowhere.

They aren\u2019t planned. They aren\u2019t expected. They catch us off guard.

It\u2019s as if a curtain is suddenly pulled back, and we catch a glimpse, for just a fleeting moment, of the reality of the invisible world. And we realize there\u2019s a lot more going on than we had suspected.

One such moment happened in my life during a Sunday morning worship service at the church I served for 28 years. An older pastor from Romania was visiting us, and we had asked him to take five or ten minutes to describe his ministry in a rural community.

Iosef Pop is a remarkable man. He has mentored a number of young pastors and released them for service across Romania\u2019s heartland.

He is courageous. When some strangers walked into his village, hoping to lure young women into a \u201cglamorous life\u201d in the West \u2013 but almost certainly into sexual slavery instead \u2013 Iosef publicly took a stand. Armed only with moral authority and confidence in the Holy Spirit, he declared, \u201cYou will not be taking any girls from this community.\u201d He prevailed.

The one thing Iosef has not been able to master is speaking English.

Therefore we hired an interpreter for his Sunday morning visit \u2013 a young woman, born in Romania, who happened to be enrolled at a nearby Hoosier university. She did not know Iosef, and as far as we knew, she was not a person of faith.

The sanctuary was packed that day. Just before Iosef spoke, about 60 children from our Sunday School paraded in to sing a pair of praise songs. There were smiles all around.

When Iosef walked to the pulpit, with the interpreter standing alongside, he was beaming.

He expressed his joy at hearing the children sing. He went on to describe the plight of so many of Romania\u2019s children. Nikolae Ceausescu, the Soviet-backed dictator who had been toppled not more than a decade earlier, had demanded that Romanians produce large families. The regime would need multitudes of children to become warriors and factory workers.

But when Ceausescu\u2019s reign imploded, life became precarious for many of those children. Some of their parents, economically crippled, simply turned them loose. Kids between the ages of six and sixteen struggled to survive on the streets. \u00a0

Iosef began to describe his vision of a future in which Romanian children would enjoy safety, security, opportunity, and the chance to go to bed at night knowing they were loved by a God who would never let them go.

That\u2019s when the interpreter suddenly lost her composure.

\u201cForgive me,\u201d she said to us, tears filling her eyes. \u201cBut what this man is saying is so moving to me. He\u2019s talking about blessing the children of my homeland. This means so much.\u201d

Tears filled many of our eyes, too. Iosef paused, not knowing what she had just said to us \u2013 but suspecting that something significant was happening. \u00a0

A curtain was being pulled back.

It was one of those \u201cthin places\u201d acknowledged by Celtic spirituality \u2013 momentary intersections between this world and the invisible realm. For just a moment, we all caught a glimpse of the entanglement of history, tragedy, hope, and grace. We watched as it dawned on a young woman that (in the words of Samwise Gamgee in The<\/em>Lord of the Rings<\/em>), \u201cThere\u2019s good in this world, and it\u2019s worth fighting for.\u201d

In the book of Genesis, Jacob has such a memorable moment.

The young man whose descendants will one day be known as the people of Israel is running for his life. He has conspired with his mother to deceive his father, stealing the much-coveted patriarchal blessing from his older brother Esau.

Now he\u2019s in the middle of nowhere, all by himself, heading for who knows where. He lays his head on a rock and falls into a fitful sleep.

But it\u2019s a sleep in which he is visited by the very God he\u2019s not sure he really believes in. God promises to bless him and watch over him. Jacob awakens and marvels, \u201cSurely the\u00a0Lord\u00a0is in this place, and I was not aware of it\u201d (Genesis 28:16). He calls that place Bethel, which means \u201chouse of God.\u201d

Every place we go turns out to be Bethel.

Every now and then the curtain is pulled back \u2013 in the middle of your kids\u2019 playtime, or in the thick of a traffic jam, or halfway through a phone call, or while you\u2019re stirring spaghetti sauce, or walking on a rain-covered sidewalk, or even (amazingly enough) during a Sunday morning worship service \u2013 and we suddenly realize that the Lord is in this place and doing something extraordinary.

And we were not aware of it.

One definition of spiritual growth is learning to trust that God is at work in every circumstance, even when the curtain isn\u2019t <\/em>pulled back, even when we\u2019re not granted those fleeting glimpses.

May the Lord bless you as you go from one Bethel to another \u2013 every hour of this seemingly ordinary day.
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To listen to today’s reflection as a podcast,\u00a0click here Many of life\u2019s most memorable spiritual moments seem to come out of nowhere. They aren\u2019t planned. They aren\u2019t expected. They catch us off guard. It\u2019s as if a curtain is suddenly pulled back, and we catch a glimpse, for just a fleeting moment, of the reality of the invisible world. And… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":4671,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[41,935],"class_list":["post-4670","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-guidance","tag-thin-places"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4670","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4670"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4670\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4672,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4670\/revisions\/4672"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4671"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4670"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4670"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4670"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}