Live full lives, full in the fullness of God. Ephesians 3:19 (MSG)
Glorious Inner Strength – The Home Series (updated) – Part 6
(back by popular request, edited and updated!)
Go to PART 1 | PART 2 | PART 3 | PART 4 | PART 5 | PART 6 | PART 7
In his book “An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth” Astronaut, Chris Hadfield, wrote about his experience of seeing the Earth from space. He said,
“But I wasn’t lonely. Loneliness, I think, has very little to do with location. It’s a state of mind. In the center of every big, bustling city are some of the loneliest people in the world. I’ve never felt that way in space. If anything, because our whole planet was on display just outside the window, I felt even more aware of and connected to the seven billion other people who call it home.”
He explained that from the distance of space he didn’t see people separated into labeled groups – this one belonging here, and that one, there. He saw us as one. Unified in our humanity.
The way we look at home, and the way we treat those within it (and the way we treat ‘home’ itself), impacts humanity with a rippling effect.
Mother Theresa said “What can you do to promote world peace? Go home and love your family.”
Family/home is where the heart is.
This idea is riddled with tension. For some of us, our families and homes are the textbook definition of dysfunction. Some of our homes are filled with grief, others with confusion and terror, some with abuse and neglect. It’s no small thing to return home and love, be love… do love.
As Jesus said, ‘I am in the father and the father is in me,” so too are we in the Divine and he is in us. Even when and if our homes feel anything but ‘homey,’ God is there filling up the space with peace and grace, wisdom and strength, faith and hope and love.
When we begin to see that cultivating a sense of home starts within us and WITH us, we can start to see that others share the same tension and challenge. And then, perhaps empathy, grace, and compassion are the ways in which we rebuild our natural homes in such a way that they and our spiritual homes begin to mix into one. Of course, this takes time. A lifetime. Living at home and searching for it simultaneously.
Because we are all connected on the continent of life and humanity, our connectedness means we all belong, we all have a place; a moment in time that we own and occupy. It is my prayer, and I think Jesus’s too, that instead of using that time fighting each other over our differences, we should be opening the doors of homes to one another, sharing our lives and hearts with each other, and celebrating the life and the time we’ve been given.
Your home is yours. You can lock it up and hide it away, if you choose. It’s also yours to share. It is yours to set the table and invite others in. It is yours to foster rest and rejuvenation, healing and comfort, fun and frivolity, joy and peace. It is yours to risk. It's yours to extend forgiveness and mercy. To do these things, but to always be journeying further into the heart of them.
So, what do we do with the dysfunction? The mess? The father we don’t speak to and the children that won’t come home? The mother who is sick and the sister that's indifferent? The cousin who abused and the son who was abused?
I don’t have any answers. And maybe that's partly why we can be at home, but also long for it.
Paul was onto something when he wrote, “I ask him to strengthen you by his Spirit—not a brute strength but a glorious inner strength — that Christ will live in you as you open the door and invite him in. And I ask him that with both feet planted firmly on love, you’ll be able to take in with all followers of Jesus the extravagant dimensions of Christ’s love. Reach out and experience the breadth! Test its length! Plumb the depths! Rise to the heights! Live full lives, full in the fullness of God.” (Eph 3:15-19 MSG).
‘Glorious inner strength'… That sounds like a great place to start.
Go to Part 7 – Precious and Holy »
Written by Lizzy Milani
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