Missed

It's dinnertime, and everyone gathers together to eat. Around the old, well-used table they sit, happy to be done with another day, perhaps laughing over an inside family joke, perhaps sighing in relief to be home. Home where each belongs, where each is valued more deeply than anything else. Home--in its truest sense--is one strong word.

Chairs fill as they gather and everyone is here. But...not everyone is here. A chair is empty. Barren. A hole in the circle 'round the table. And the mood saddens a little as each realizes that the circle is incomplete.

The family's incomplete when one is missing. Even if it's just for a day, just for a meal.

But when they're missing for years? For decades? That's years and decades worse.

Could it be--I think it is--that every day there are empty spaces around a big well-used table where we belong? And that every day the rest of the family's mood saddens a little because the circle's incomplete?

"And the Spirit and the bride say 'Come!'...He who testifies to these things says, 'Surely I am coming quickly.'" (Rev. 22:16, 20)

You are missed. I am missed.

Every day we're here, and not there. There, where we belong. There, where everyone was meant to belong.

It's almost time to go home. May we each want to go home, to our real home, forever!

Welcome

Perhaps you know the feeling too...

We walk into one home--a simple, tiny, rented house of three college-age roommates--and we all plop down on the old couch, or crowd into the kitchen to provide an overabundance of cooks and fruit-and-veggie-choppers, and everyone chats with everyone else, and even I (a bit shy in new groups) feel like I've found my second family. Welcome.

We walk into another home--a bigger, family-owned house, with redone kitchen and furnishings new and sparkly--and people hover around the edges, eventually sit down in a friend-group here, a friend-group there, and "family" is a thing reserved for those already in, not extended to the new ones. Not so welcome.

The point of these little stories?

It's the people that make the welcome.

And people with His heart give the best welcomes.

Father, please give me Your heart for all your children--old and young--to love them and welcome them into Your kingdom!