With Family Day just a couple days behind us, I’m finding myself reflecting on family much more than usual. Within my own immediate family there are some pretty significant changes up ahead as my parents prepare to move to Finland. My sister and I have our own places and, in a mystery that Little Laura never could have anticipated, we’re in our thirties and our family unit is back to being “just the four of us”. And it is beautiful and healthier than it ever has been.
My extended family looks completely different today than it did five years ago. Both sides of my family lost both the matriarch and the patriarch who brought the Puiras and Puikkonen families into existence… and, to be honest, it’s proving to be quite the mess to begin re-building what family looks like for aunts and uncles and cousins and their babies when the grandparents simply aren’t around to hold us together; to gather us all up in their homes again.
Thankfully, reflecting on family no longer ends there for me… I have been blessed by many “home-away-from-home” families over the years and have more mamas and papas, aunties and uncles than you’d think a person could need! I’ve experienced the closeness of family-like bonds with friends who have simply gone through the thick of it with one another.
There are also amazing church families that I get to call my own. The church that I grew up in, Wellspring, and of course, the church I went to grown-but-still-growing, Lifespring!
And yet even those families aren’t my favourite.
Each and every one of us were created for another family altogether. And all these littler families that we’re part of, whether we’ve been born or adopted or grafted into them, are glimpses of an even greater family.
The Family of God, the Kingdom Family.
“Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ. For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight. In love he predestined us for adoption to sonship through Jesus Christ, in accordance with his pleasure and will— to the praise of his glorious grace, which he has freely given us in the One he loves.”
EPHESIANS 1:3-6
I find it super interesting that not only did God choose us for adoption into God’s own family before the creation of the world?! …but that this reality of our adoption through Jesus is where the Apostle Paul begins the book of Ephesians.
This understanding of who we truly are, the Family to which we were meant to belong in before the skies and waters separated, is foundational to everything.
This is the bottom line: We are loved and chosen, children of God.
And just like Gabe was teaching us on Sunday, we are everlasting beings! Yes, our bodies will eventually fade and grow old and pass away, sometimes our bodies fail us much earlier in life too! But these spirits within us… these spirits that light up and enliven our bodies will never, ever fade away. Because of Christ and the gift, we have received, we will be part of this everlasting Kingdom Family forever.
One of the most striking things to me about this everlasting, Kingdom Family is that its founder, the very beginning of this family, will never, ever fade away.
God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, is our Father too.
He will never begin to grow frail or lose his memory.
He will never need us to take care of him.
He will never move away suddenly or forget who we are.
He will never, ever stop loving us…
He has been loving us and choosing us since before the creation of this world!!
We have been held, are held, and will forever be held in the Love of God.
And so, no matter what our earthly families look like… no matter how much they change or how messy or beautiful they may be at any given moment… we must never forget that we will always be held together (with infinitely more brothers and sisters than we could ever count) and gathered up into our truest home, the presence of God.
Thank you so, so much Lord for this outrageously massive Love of yours.
We will never be able to fathom it and yet we are never hidden away from it…
Thank you for choosing us and loving us before we can calculate and for promising to hold us beyond amounts of time we can understand…
Thank you for being our Everlasting God and for calling us your own.
We love you and choose you too,
Amen.