Blooming Where You Never Chose to Be

When Hurricane Katrina scattered 100,000 residents of New Orleans across the country in 2005, many landed in Houston with nothing but the clothes on their backs. Among them was a woman named Mamie Harris, a retired schoolteacher in her seventies who had lived her entire life in the Lower Ninth Ward. She wept for weeks, convinced her displacement was temporary.

But the months stretched on, and Mamie's neighborhood remained underwater in every sense. A friend from church finally told her, "Mamie, you can grieve New Orleans and still love Houston." Something shifted. She started tutoring neighborhood children at the local library. She planted tomatoes in her small apartment courtyard. She joined a congregation and began teaching Sunday school again. Within two years, she had become the honorary grandmother of an entire block of strangers-turned-family.

Mamie never stopped missing home. But she stopped waiting for life to begin again somewhere else.

This is the stunning counsel the Lord gave His exiled people through Jeremiah. They wanted a rescue date. God gave them a gardening assignment. Build houses. Plant gardens. Raise families. Seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you. The Almighty was not asking them to forget Jerusalem. He was asking them to stop believing that faithfulness could only happen in comfortable places. Your exile is not a waiting room. It is holy ground — if you are willing to dig in and bloom.