Love Where You Live By Shauna PilgreenSample

Day Two

Choosing to Live Sent

Scripture: Jeremiah 29:5–7

Whether you’re about to go or you’re wondering what you’re still doing here—this is your moment, the intersection of life as usual or life as sent. You might not need a physical relocation but a spiritual relocation of where your heart’s affection and mind’s attention should be. Your job has greater purpose than just clocking in, leading a team, or winning the case. The one-bedroom apartment, the commute, and the countless people at the superstore are not just random pieces of living. 

God is calling professionals, families, students, and empty nesters who love Him to specific dwelling places. What each of us has to offer is critical to how God has set up His mission on earth. In the workplace and the neighborhoods, around the conference room and the lunch table, God equips His people with influence and a voice that can speak into the seekers and the lost of cities and towns, suburbs and up-and-coming communities. He expects greatness from His followers. Not a Christian version of life borrowed from the secular market but the finest, most excellent life we can live. 

It’s dwellers of faith who have the opportunity right now in history to be among the influencers and dreamers. Not as Christians who have moved onto the scene but as accountants, developers, entrepreneurs, teachers, scientists, lawyers, and volunteers who are Christians. We must have a vision for being where we live. We have to be creative and intentional. 

Choosing to live sent is moving toward something, not away from something, and leads to an attachment to your community. Living sent is the strategy of loving people well in your town whom you are sent to love and watching God connect the dots. Living sent is for those who are called to stay in their childhood places and for those who must cross oceans. 

Living sent is for those who want to move and those who have to move. For those who want to stay and those who have to stay. To live sent is to be tied, first and foremost, to the trinity of the God-created heart, mind, and soul. Living sent is an awakening to God’s activity as we learn a culture and graciously give the truth of Christ. 

How would your perspective change in your work, neighborhood, and ordinary errands if you saw them through the perspective of being sent?