Stay Close to Your Sacred Spaces

I’m wondering if you are familiar with the phrase “sacred space.” It comes to us largely from Celtic theology, which is a particular love of mine. I think there is important meaning in this phrase for all of us who lead and I want to help you apply it to your life.

Sacred space simply means a physical place or location in which the sacred is experienced. God is encountered. Spiritual realities seem near. The Celts called such places “thin places.” In other words, sacred spaces were terrain that did not seem to be separated from the spiritual. They were “thin” because they were not the barriers to the spiritual that other places seemed to be.

You can imagine the types of places that are usually listed among “sacred spaces.” Glorious cathedrals. Amazing natural vistas. The sites of historic events. It is common for people to report that they “feel God” in such places.

Yet what I want to talk to you about are the sacred spaces of your own life. I’m guessing there are certain locations you return to time and again. You’ve prayed there. You’ve contemplated your destiny. You’ve perhaps made life changing decisions or fought great battles of soul there. They are sacred spaces to you. They are where you “listen” and feel yourself viewing your life from a great and spiritual height. I want you to know these places. I want you to return to them.

You see, what usually causes leaders to fail is that they lose their moorings. They forget who they are and what they have set themselves to become. They get knocked off balance by the blows of the world and the distractions of this life—even the temptations of this life. They then cease being what they were meant to be. They forget who they were, what they were sacrificing to become. I’ve seen it hundreds of times, usually in lives now filled with regret and destruction.

This is why I want you to stay close to the sacred spaces of your life. Returning to them helps you see your current life from the perspective of a more innocent and perhaps less jaded time. You remember the commitments. You recall the covenants and the determinations that launched you. You can feel the spirit that drew you toward what you are doing now.

There is sacred space for me in a field near the university where I did my undergraduate work. I prayed for hours there and thought about my life with all of it yet spread out before me. All these years later, I return to that field. I remember. I renew. I pray. I re-commit. I do the same in cemeteries, which are nearly all sacred spaces for me. There are a few chapels and there are a number of mountain tops that are sacred spaces for me. I feel almost as though God is waiting for me in these places, as though there is a conversation about my life to be resumed. This is what sacred space is and what it ought to mean to us.

The higher you rise, the more you need to stay close to the sacred spaces of your life. Visit them. Remember who you were. Take a close look at who you are. Recover the GPS of the soul. Realign and reclaim. The life of a leader is negatively shifted in inches, not in miles. You have to keep your eye on your trajectory. You have to check in with your former self and with God. This will keep you on the high and productive path you are meant for.