Joshua 15:48-54: in context

This is part of the long allotment of the tribe of Judah, a list of towns in the hill country: Shamir, Jattir, Socoh, Dannah, and on through eleven cities here and nine there, each with its surrounding villages, ending with Hebron. It is exactly the kind of place-name list a reader skips, town after town in Judah's inheritance.

A list of town names seems the least rewarding page in the Bible, and yet there is something in it worth seeing. Every one of these obscure places was somebody's home, somebody's inheritance, the plot of ground where a family in Judah would live, farm, raise children, and be buried. God did not give Judah a vague territory; he gave specific families specific towns, each named and recorded, so that no clan was left without a place. The care of the allotment is the point: God is a God of particular gifts, not general ones, who settles his people not in an abstraction but in named, mapped, real places with real boundaries. And the whole arrangement was by lot, received as gift rather than seized by strength, each family taking the portion God assigned. Behind the tedious list is a God who gives his people a place to belong, down to the name of the town, and who has prepared, the New Testament will say, a particular place for each of his own. The dull register is really a record of a God who gives every family a home.

Do I trust that God gives his people particular, prepared places rather than leaving them homeless in an abstraction, and can I receive the portion he has assigned me as gift rather than grasping for another?