Gospel and family

Yesterday was my birthday. 34 years old now. It was the first birthday I have ever spent away from home. I didn't realize that until this morning, but it remains true. Growing up, having a birthday in Mid-August meant my birthday was the last thing that would happen before school started back up. Even when I moved away from home for that first run at college, we celebrated my 18th birthday the day before I moved into my dorm. My birthday was always a day surrounded by family and friends. As a kid, it meant mom making me whatever I wanted for dinner... usually manicotti, whatever kind of cake I wanted... cheesecake or black forest cake were always in the running, and a day doing whatever I desired. As time went by, those things changed, as life often does. This was my 8th birthday without mom, 12th birthday since Z and I got married, 9th birthday as a dad, 16th birthday since that day before college started... the first time.

This year, it was a birthday in a different city, in a different state, in a different time zone... birthday wishes from friends and family come from 3000 miles away. And yet, it was the most with family feel I have had in many years. Its funny quickly God creates family. In a home that we've lived in for a month now, in a city that has only been home for 7 months, with people we had never met before January, we had a birthday dinner with 7 new family members. We sat together, we talked, we watched baseball, we ate food, we did what family does.

Shortly before we left on this journey, I was studying in the book of Acts, and I wrote about sacrifice. The idea behind it being that when we read scripture, and we read biographies of missionaries, or martyrs, we often come to a common theme, the idea that when we sacrifice all we know and all we are for the cause of Christ, then we find that we truly have sacrificed nothing at all. (You can find that post here) As I sat in my living room Saturday evening, I didn't feel the distance between me and my family, I didn't feel the strife of selling our home. I didn't feel the sting of leaving behind the path we though we had laid before us. I didn't feel loss. I felt love, and comfort, and home.

That is the power of the gospel for believers. We so often stop with the gospel at salvation and leave it there, mistakenly thinking that it only the power of God unto salvation. Or, more correctly, we mistakenly believe that salvation has to do with a single, momentary flash of light bringing the sinner from death to life. Salvation is an every-present, growing reality in the life of those who have been, are being, and will be saved, and thus the gospel is not simply the power to begin this process, it is the power and life-blood that courses through the beating heart of the now-living Christian. The gospel does not lose power or benefit after one professes belief, rather that is only beginning of it's power! The power of the life-giving word of God is desperately needed among the church, in the midst of the believers. The gospel has the power to bring you to new places, to meet new people, and to LOVE them... you cannot love them without it, you're not that strong, that good, or that powerful. Without the power of the gospel, my home wouldn't be full of people I didn't know before the calendar flipped this year. Without the power of the gospel, they wouldn't be my family.