Articles
A Tribute To God's Extended Family
Our son, Andrew, fell ill in the last days of the semester. By the time he arrived in Atlanta with a friend, what had been diagnosed as strep had become early-stage pneumonia. He was to fly home last Monday, but on Sunday evening we got a call from his friend’s mother that she felt a trip to the ER was necessary. Andrew was struggling with high fever, heavy cough and difficulty breathing – not the kind of phone call parents like to get about their children.
Our friend, Sara Haynes, remained at the hospital all night as the ER staff kept Andrew around to gauge his improvement after IV fluids, breathing treatments and antibiotics. Finally, he was discharged about 6 a.m. After packing up all his college gear and filling prescriptions, Sara, Andrew and Sara’s son, Robert, headed for Charlotte, N.C., where we met them about 3 that afternoon. Oh, and Sara already had done Andrew’s laundry that he hauled up from Tampa.
The moral of this story is simple: What a wonderful blessing it is to belong to the family of God! To know people who are willing to be “surrogate parents,” to take care of your children like their own, to sacrifice to see that all is well with them is an inexpressible richness.
Jesus promises that there is none who sacrifices family for Him “who shall not receive a hundredfold now in this time – houses and brothers and sisters and mothers and children and lands, with persecutions – and in the age to come, eternal life” (Mark 10:29-30). But this is also true of those who don’t sacrifice family connections for their faith; they, too, inherit an extended, caring, loving family that provides support, protection, courage and a host of other necessities in a life of uncertainty and hardship.
However, to fully benefit from this family network we have to cultivate our place in it. We must interact, serve, love; we must care about our brethren and be available to them when needed. But some remain aloof, detached, disinterested – ever wondering why no one seems to care about them. What a blessing are such people as Sara, Danny and Marcia, Greg and Tim, Herb and Trish, Theresa, Sherry, and ... (How long is your list?).
