Love always circles back to the lover. This truth extends to the  inanimate.

   Love the space you occupy and the space will love you. Treat your environment as sacred and you become a part of the sacred. Know that the spaces you honor are not always grand. You make a place sacred by the way you see it and treat it. 

   It was just another hay-strewn hut until Mary birthed Jesus in it. A humble log cabin in Kentucky is today hallowed as the birthplace of Abraham Lincoln. A shabby room in a French pension became famous when Vincent Van Gogh rendered it so vividly that his painting now hangs in another sacred place, the Louvre. 

   What spaces are sacred to you?

   Loving your physical space seems easy when it is a flower-drenched meadow, a forest populated with Sequoias or your own bedroom decorated with things you love. When you design a room to your taste, you pick what comforts your body and inspires your soul. 

   What if your home is a prison cell? In the wake of Nelson Mandela's death millions revisit in picture and in person a stark cell (left) sanctified by Mandela's imprisonment in it for twenty-seven years. One of his greatest legacies was his refusal to pursue revenge after his release in 1990 and his 1994 ascendancy to the presidency of South Africa.

   Mandela said that if he hated his jailers he would trade one prison for another. By loving his enemies, Mandela pointed you to the truth that prison is not only a physical cell but can be built with your attitude. 

   No matter how grand or humble, can you flavor the place where you work with Love?  Can you make your job setting holy by creating sacred encounters there?

   There is no more sacred "space" than the spiritual square footage of your soul. There is no greater thing you can do than to decorate your life with Love. 

-Erie Chapman