The trouble with visiting places you’ve long dreamed about is the inevitable arrival of reality. The dream is so often sweeter than the truth.

So it was with Viroqua. The closest thing to a city in the Kickapoo Area, it’s a center of commerce and cultural life for a densely inhabited surrounding farmland.

In keeping with the large numbers of dropouts, hippies and back-to-earthers in the area, Viroqua is home to a bewildering array of alternative medicines, shamanists, and other counterculture types. A friend told me that nearly all his friends are pot smokers; a walk around town feels far more urbane than most big cities in the Midwest, what with the punks, the artists, organic food co-ops, counterculture book stores, coffee roasters, pet therapists and random wandering lost souls.

My friend further told me of a significant cultural divide between the churches in town, and the “Ridgers” as the counterculture folk are called. It’s not exactly animosity; it’s people living in different worlds and speaking different languages, even as they live on top of each other.

For years now, whenever we’ve gotten fed up with city life, Becca and I have dreamed of some day living in Viroqua. The dream was not fully based on real experiences. After a day in town, on the drive back to Madison, Becca asked: “are we ready to talk about Viroqua?” Because we both knew. There was an unfriendly feel.

Rather than finding a utopia, we found a real place. The only utopia lived in our heads, in the original, Latin sense of the word: Utopia means Nowhere.

Viroqua is not nowhere. So my first response to her question was: “Is there anywhere that we belong?”

The slap in the face of a real town, with real, rude people, culture gaps, and so on—it reveals a deeper need: this is a spiritual question more than anything else: Where will we find our rest?

There remains, then, a Sabbath-rest for the people of God; 10for anyone who enters God's rest also rests from his own work, just as God did from his. Hebrews 4:9-10