... when in the last 24 hours you've heard from your 16 year-old daughter in Rwanda & she whispers to you how she never wants to stop worshipping & serving like she has on the red dirt...
and your 18 year-old boy calls home from 20 hrs away at the ocean where he's been a camp counsellor this week on a native Indian reserve & he tells you as he waits for the new campers to arrive he just wants to get away with The Word and God for a few hours...
and your 20 year-old connects from university, that he's pressing hard on his summer term's final assignments, giving it all he's got, and he'll try to get home real soon...
and you stand in a quiet kitchen & you realize that all the years of frying up bacon & serving up their plates & reading to them E.B. White & the Gospel of Matthew & Huckleberry Finn, of looking for those darn lost shoes when we were already 10 minutes late & patting down their rooster tails & us all learning over years how to take a deep breath & exhale, learning how to hold on to each other because family is about being a safe place where no one ever pushes you out of the boat... learning how to pause in the midst of our mess & listen for the heartbeat of grace & feel the waterfall of fresh mercy....
Who knew that all of this, everyday messy for years... all the mundane moments were adding up into miracles: it was all growing up real people to love a real hurting world.
Because yeah, that's what we're all trying to do here, right wherever we are, & it's what we're all teaching our kids to do in a crazy, tumultuous world: Learning how to hold on to each other because we all belong to each other & this world needs us all to make safe places where where no one ever pushes you out of the boat.... where we don't pass by anyone without helping them turn their sails to the wind so they can wing their way out into the wide open world, that's just waiting for them to bring only what they can bravely bring.
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