TOGETHER IN THEIR 50's

I think I’m finally hitting that god-forsaken age after the spoiled stages of childhood, the rebellious stages of teen-hood, and the independent stages of college and young adulthood when I mean it when I say that I love being home and that I sincerely miss my parents when I’m back at school. It’s really quite sad that the only thing I feel moved to blog about these days are my parents and their relationship, but I’m so thankful for them and their labor of love; and the way it’s constantly making me reflect on the reality of God’s love for me exemplified through my parents’ love in my life… brings me to tears just thinking about it.

In God’s own word’s, life is best lived as a poor beggar brought in to eat at the King’s table and to live in the riches of a prodigal King, disciplined by thankfulness for the rest of the beggar’s life, than left alone as a spoiled child, a rebellious teenager, or even an independent adult outside the palace walls. What’s more moving than to know the King himself, or rather that He knows you, when you yourself “were dead in your transgressions and sins…” – dead man walking, busy with work and life and friends, apathetic to most things outside ourselves – “…but because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions—it is by grace you have been saved. And God raised us up with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus, in order that in the coming ages he might show the incomparable riches of his grace, expressed in his kindness to us in Christ Jesus. For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God…” (Ephesians 2:1-8)

Malcolm Gladwell, in his book Outliers, suggests that 95% of who we are as a person is outside of our control. That includes our geographical location and our genetics, both determined by birth (i.e. my parents). The rest left to personal choice. I want to choose… a disciplined life of thankfulness for the gifts God’s given me, the greatest of all being Christ (as emphasized over and over in that small passage alone), remembering to look back at what’s past, to look around to what’s given, and to look forward to the incomparable riches of his grace to come.