We started by going to church together on Saturday night...our pastor preached a beautiful message about how God never wastes our wounds...He's always using them to make something new. The next morning, the kids were thrilled to discover candy and trinkets and "Phineas and Ferb Live" tickets in their Easter baskets. And, frankly, no one ever outgrows egg hunts. So, they hunted eggs in succession according to their ages. Then we finally got around to dyeing our eggs, which we then ate with our homemade Easter bread. While we ate, Dan read the Easter story from the last few chapters of Mathew, and here's a beautiful blessing: everyone listened...even the little boys. Amazing. We cleaned, and family arrived. The kids had a blast with their grandparents and cousins...there were lovely conversations, games, chicken observations, great food, and general merriment. As Dan's parents were leaving, they noticed someone had put a "Little Tykes" playhouse out for garbage; they called to see if we wanted it...um yeah! So, Dan and some of the kids went to help load it into the back of Pooey's (my father-on-law) truck. While they were gone, Nate and I tossed a nerf-style football around. Once home and assembled, we saw that it was in decent shape - just missing the door. Easily solved by cutting a piece of tarp and screwing it up over the door. Voila! Kids are amused. Gram and Pooey also found two matching toy dump trucks that my little boys are just adoring driving all around the yard.
So picture this...we're all outside, kids are happy and playing, Sophie is hungrily reading The Hunger Games, I am chasing my chickens around with my camera, and Dan is preparing our first fire of the season. (See, I am married to a pyro. And I am raising several more of them. Fire is such a unite-r.)
Before I know it, everyone has pulled up a chair around the fire pit...quiet conversation and contended sighs testify to the soothing balm that togetherness brings. But it is the warmth, the glow, the fire that has me thinking. It was not only the togetherness. It was not only the gorgeous weather. It was not only the lovely time with family, and it was not my homemade mac and cheese. On Saturday, we went to sleep with praise music singing through our heads and our Pastor's words on our hearts, after worshipping together - no Sunday school, no serving, no teaching. Just all of us in church, together. Then, we awoke to a remembrance of Christ's loving sacrifice for us; we started the day with prayer, broken bread, and His Word. That. THAT is the fuel to the fire. The Spirit is just fanning it into a something bigger, hotter, more consuming... How do we keep that roaring in the minutia of everyday? The key is in the fuel...we have to keep feeding the fire, so the Spirit has something to fan.
I was noticing, as Dan and I put some old sticks and fence panels on the fire, how quickly this dry timber caught fire and how quickly it roared up into a huge blaze, a blaze that seemed to sear the fronts of our legs as we sat near it. But in this huge blaze, this dry timber was so quickly consumed...isn't that so like our spiritual lives? I am reminded of a portion of my favorite Shakespearean sonnet, from sonnet 73:
"In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed whereon it must expire
Consumed with that which it was nourish'd by."
Shakespeare was not writing about God. In fact scholars think he was writing to a lover who was not his wife, a lover the scholars call the "fair youth" (who was probably male). But what caught me was this - can others see God's fire glowing in you? In me? And conversely, can they see when it is not? Is your faith, my faith...is it lying upon the ashes of our youth - our foolishness - our world hungry selves? Or is it lying on the ashes of His Word, His Love, His Sacrifice? If you don't continue to feed a fire some fuel, the ashes will eventually smother out the remaining embers, right? No fuel, no oxygen, no fire. So a fire is "consumed with that which is is nourished by." What are you feeding your fire? How often are you feeding your fire? What is in your ashes? What about mine...if I don't provide good fuel of God's word, worship, and prayer, what once fed my fire will become the very thing that smothers it out.
I have noticed that a hunger for God is often an inverse hunger. The more I feed myself of Him, the more I want. The less I feed myself of Him, the less and less I hunger for His word, His precepts, Him. And isn't that so like a fire? The more you feed a fire, the bigger it gets, the hotter, the hungrier. But leave it be, and it will smother itself out. So how can we feed the fire of a family? Feed it together.
Our God is a relational God - so relational that He Himself exists as a relationship between the Father, the Son, and the Spirit. So to grow faith as a family, in a community, we must seek out ways to feed our fires His fuel...together. Yes, we must grow our own faiths personally and independently, too; this is not to negate the importance of that. But I can't help but reflect on the beautiful glow of my family, of my kids, of us as a family relational unit that came about on Easter Sunday. We don't get a chance to start our day in prayer or God's word (or even end it, for that matter) as much as I want. But this weekend, we were all looking at God's goodness and love, feeling thankful, lapping up the nourishment provided by His Word and the mystery of worship, and we did it together. That is what fueled the fire...the fire that unites us with Him: "Both the one who makes men holy and those who are made holy are of the same family. So Jesus is not ashamed to call them brothers" (Hebrews 2:11).
So the take-away: let the glow of togetherness as a family be fueled by a seeking of Him together, outside of Sunday's church. It needs to be regular, like eating, sleeping. And honestly, praying before meals and bed isn't gonna cut it anymore. We are hungrier now, older in our faith. We haven't yet found something that we can stick with as a family to do this, regularly, always. Pray with me that God will show us how?
Grateful for His web of grace,
MamaWebb
Very inspiring. Thanks so much for sharing. Please update if you find that "something" to help facilitate family worship.
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