Who was Nehemiah anyway? The first thing you find out when you set out to answer that question is that nobody knows. That is actually good news for us. That means he could have been anybody. It’s not that he comes from a long line of kings and he was merely fulfilling his kingly destiny when he set out to rebuild the walls of Jerusalem. He was the son of Hacaliah, for heaven’s sake. Well who was Hacaliah? Nobody knows that, either. All Hacaliah does is tell us which Nehemiah he was. Oh, he was Hacaliah’s Nehemiah.

Since Nehemiah could have been anybody, any one of us could be Nehemiah in our world. So this is what we will learn from him in the next three days: He was a man with a Place, a Passion and a Plan.

He was a man with a Place. Nehemiah knew he belonged somewhere else. He may have even been born in Babylon during Israel’s exile, but his heart was bent toward the city of Jerusalem, the land of his ancestors.

I have to admit, I don’t have much of a sense of place. Other than the fact that my parents lived in the same house since I was born, that house now belongs to someone else so that’s how significant that was. And of the time before they moved into that house, I know next to nothing. It was never important. For that reason I always took to the spiritualization of home for Christians as being somewhere else. “This world is not my home; I’m just a-passin’ through” makes sense to me, as does Larry Norman’s 1970’s view of the same thing: “Only Visiting This Planet.”

Yet I believe there is a sense of place in this world that is important – it’s just that I don’t emotionally connect to it. For this I have to defer to my wife who has a very grand sense of place. (Our different views on place is something I spent a novel exploring in Ashes on the Wind.) To her, place is roots, commitment, neighborhood, community, and the legacy of leaving something behind. I learn about these things from her. Her connection to this house is rooted in these things – the neighborhood, the relationship, even the school district that is committed to serving Chandler’s learning disability. I can live anywhere, proven by the fact that we have – but our process in and out of the places we have lived has led Marti through a great deal of pain and uprootedness. I’ve missed a great deal here. I think our common American view of a house as only an investment has too.

The scriptures teach about eternity, but always how an eternal perspective affects the lives we live now. It doesn’t diminish the importance of those lives and connections; it actually increases it. Nehemiah was driven by a passion to rebuild his place. We are driven by a passion to save ours. We are so grateful for your huge part in helping us do this. And hopefully, as we do this, you will be rethinking your commitment to place and what that means.