Finally, FINALLY, after being able to look at rats in the road in Turkmenestan for years, Google Maps has added high-res satellite imagery of one of the major college towns in AMERICA -- Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Although, it covers only about half of the town, but it at least gets the university.

Tuscaloosa, Alabama

I know this means very little to most of you, but it actually is significant to me to be able to look at maps to remember a place. I've even started a live lifemap, but it is not finished yet so you may want to wait to see it. In any case, it is good to zoom around a lot of the places that have had a lot of significance in my life, especially a place like Tuscaloosa. There was a lot of pain and heartache there for me, but about hundredfold as many incredible experiences that shaped me in big ways. It was in a place like this that I could sit around the dining table at a friend's house and see a light-hearted game turn into a deep discussion of the spiritual longings of each others' lives. (Rather than sit in my living room and listen to Christians see how vulgar they can get and laugh about it.) A place where a simple gathering at a student's apartment would end up being a two-hour prayer session. A place with a lot of darkness, and in many ways a pervasive darkness, but an equally strong spiritual warfare that took place in the same place. Something as simple as looking upon the roofs of these places, upon the open green of the Quad, the sidewalks down 15th Street, reminds me of a kind of sharpness to life that is hard to find in the weird fuzziness of my current locale.

Here's to the wonders of modern technological cartography.