The Good Life

I've been learning a lot about family lately.  How once you have kids, life drastically changes.  It's kind of unnoticeable at first, after the first few weeks.  Once babies are out of the brand-new stage and they're only waking up once or twice a night, they are pretty low-maintenance.  Eat, sleep, poop, look around, repeat.  You're still able to do pretty much everything you did before, you're just hauling around some more equipment.  You say to yourself "I don't know what all those older people are talking about.  This isn't so bad.  I'd rather have my kids brought into all the ministry I'm doing, and let them grow up in it."  And this works for a while.  It's a little tougher when they start to crawl...and then walk...and run/scream/play.  Now it takes a lot more effort to keep up with them and keep them entertained.  You find yourself saying "no, I can't make it" more often, due to nap times and bed times, meals, and whether the place is kid-friendly or not.  And then kid number 2 shows up and everything doubles.  Ours is on the way, but I'm assuming that everything more than doubles, as it's no longer the parents trading off who's on "kid duty," but now both of you are needed all the time.

You feel like you kind of fade from the scene, as you're not in the pulsing "ministry" artery anymore.  Church services seem like a blur, because half of the time you are trying to wrangle the insatiable curiosity of a toddler.

And yet, at the same time, you find yourself saying "man, I never knew it could be this good."  Watching your child put the crayons back in the box, dump them out of the box, put them back in the box, dump them... brings a ton of joy.  Spending afternoons working on gardening layouts, while your wife sews and your child plays bring an amount of satisfaction and fullness you didn't know existed.

Man, I didn't know it could be this good.

Ziggy Marley wrote a song called Family Time that captures this really well.  We listen to it on Saturday mornings, because that's our family time.  We eat waffles, skype with grandpa and grandma, and goof off.  Most of our evenings consist of: dinner, cleaning up, passion projects, goofing around, and bed.  That's it, and that's all it needs to be in this season.  Not too long from now there will be plays, sports, and random school/community functions.  But that's next season, this is this season.

We still get to pour into others, too.  It's having a friend over for lunch and encouraging them.  It's giving a fellow parent some advice.  It's investing heavily into the community around us.  We've been welcomed into all different kinds of circles that others aren't in yet, and we get to be leaven that's kneaded into these places until it's transformed into something that's completely new.

This is life abundant.  This is the tiniest sprout of Acts 2 - type living that's beginning to take shape, in a totally different way than I had thought.  It looks more like 1 Thess 4:11.  Why?  Because Family and Kingdom are synonymous.  We're called sons and daughters of the eternal Father.  Jesus came to reveal the Father.  That's the over-arching goal of the whole thing.  Family.  The governmental structure of the Kingdom is family, and everything from a relational standpoint flows from that one truth.

Family.

Man I didn't know it could be this good.