Focus on Family

That's not my family, though I do believe the four generations living could probably rival the numbers.  No, it's just a random picture I found to illustrate a point I recently learned.  I now realize I've been coming to it gradually, but it has cemented in my mind.

In his book "Vanishing Grace", Phillip Yancey takes us through a process of revealing who God is and what he intends or asks of us as his children.  We're studying the book in the adult Sunday School class I lead and a current chapter provided a new twist on an old idea ... the central theme of our Bible.  Yancey put it pretty plainly:

God gets his family back.

The words washed over me and those in our class.  Do they not embody the very essence of the Gospel we claim to embrace?  The story God weaves has him starting in a burst of creative energy, watching his family rebel and leave, enacting an eternal plan of rescue and redemption, and finally ends with the biggest family reunion bash in the universe.  God gets his family back!

If we could lay aside our petty arguments and combative opinions, we could see that God is looking to rescue and redeem all those on who he has placed his "thumbprint".  If we can only view everyone - and I do mean EVERYONE - as having an eternal soul with intrinsic worth to our Heavenly Father, perhaps we would more joyfully set aside whatever it is we are doing and instead go about the business of being salt and light, or as Yancey puts it, dispensers of Grace.

The Crooked Path is a journey to reach our Home ... the place where family comes together.  It's part of God's story to us and about us.  My prayer is that I try to live that out just a little more fully than before.