We live as if following our passions will bring us joy. But in reality, this way of life brings us not joy, but happiness- a temporary feeling of pleasure as our desires are met, leaving us with a renewed longing for satisfaction when the glow recedes. What if the safety, comfort, and hope we long for is found, not in following our passions, but by making (and keeping) promises to one another? What if the church is a community of people bound together, not by their common passions, but by their common promises: from one another to one another, from one another to God, and most importantly, the promise of God to them?
The Wildness of the Family of God
Saying that the church is a family doesn’t risk making the church sound tedious. If anything, it risks the opposite. We always flee our families, not because we have figured them out, but because they are the only people that we cannot figure out. That we cannot control…
“The supreme adventure is being born. There we do walk suddenly into a splendid and startling trap. There we do see something of which we have not dreamed before. Our father and mother do lie in wait for us and leap out on us, like brigands from a bush. Our uncle is a surprise. Our aunt is, in the beautiful common expression, a bolt from the blue. When we step into the family, by the act of being born, we do step into a world which is incalculable, into a world which has its own strange laws, into a world which could do without us, into a world that we have not made. In other words, when we step into the family we step into a fairy-tale.”