being with family

Its a beautiful thing to be home. Especially with this sense of freedom of letting the Spirit move and make all the plans. I don't ever want to go home again with all these things I want to accomplish and people I want to see and measurements to determine how productive or successful or worthwhile it is. I got to sit and talk with my mom and dad. Thats more than enough. I get to be with Jesus. I get to let the Spirit do whatever he wants. I've gone through so many phases in life where I have had such little appreciation for my parents and my family. Being eighteen, I'm sure I will go through many, many more. But they really are wonderful. God doesn't make mistakes and he entrusted me to them. He's known all along what I am discovering: their gifts and love and support. Our family shapes the ministry we do for the entirety of our lives. Even family situations that are really hard and messy are of God because then we get to enter in to that very situation with others and walk with them.

God, I don't know how to love my family. Will you show me? you have loved each of them perfectly and flawlessly. My love is always self seeking. It always makes demands. But not yours, love. Your love is deep. It is scandalous. It loves when the response is wrong. It loves when I would say there is nothing left to love.
 There is always something left to love.

I'm starting to learn about adults having wisdom. Like my parents. Real wise. Its so funny and humbling to think of all the times I was sure they didn't know anything. Of course they do. They know a whole lot. And it would be really strategic if I spent some time listening. Listening is part of this life-is-a-gift mentality Jesus has been working my heart on.

Heres the thing about listening. Its fruitful. Jesus can talk through anyone. And people have lots of beautiful insights. Second, it takes the pressure and frustration out of conversations because you don't have to worry constantly and always be trying to talk and tell stories and plan what youre going to say. Finally, people feel loved. We all love to be listened to. We all know that feeling that in most of our conversations the other person is not really listening. And think about it, when we are deep, intentional listeners, we gain a lot more insight because everything we have to say we already know. But they may say something we never thought of. So we benefit more from listening. And whoever you're with will be immensely blessed. And God listens to us all the time. He never gets tired of listening to us. I still have no idea what it means to listen to God. To just sit and be with them and not fill our time with my constant chatter. And thats okay. There is no such thing as a bad way to spend time with our Lover. He adores us. He'll take whatever we want to give him. But if we did get to that place with him where we could just sit in comfortable silence and rest and be and listen...
I can hardly imagine.
I really think to reach God on that level demands a lifestyle change. If we are rushed, overcommitted, multi-taskers, and have a  whole lot of trouble listening to people who we can see and hear and engage with human to human, how could we stop the way our mind works and the state of our spirit for the brief moments of our day with God? My love of productivity is so evident in my time with the Lord..the way I go through scripture, the way I control our time together, the way I put it on a time schedule...I can't turn that off. But Jesus can transform my heart. Each of our hearts. Thats such a reason to rejoice.

And think of that feeling when we come home to our family and how that will be magnified and a million times more lovely and glorious when we go home to Jesus. That is our hope and our inheritance.