Bringing God Home

And you must love the LORD your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your strength.  And you must commit yourselves wholeheartedly to these commands that I am giving you today.  Repeat them again and again to your children.  Talk about them when you are at home and when you are on the road, when you are going to bed and when you are getting up.  Tie them to your hands and wear them on your forehead as reminders.
— Deuteronomy 6:5–8 (NLT)

 The last few years have quietly reshaped how I think about faith and family.  I love my church.  I have not stopped missing the sermons or the people there that closeness is real.  But somewhere along the way I began to feel disconnected from it, and for a long time I could not name why.

Part of it is simple.  I am a grandfather now, and a good deal of my time goes to my grandchildren and my children, helping wherever I’m needed.  For a while I carried that as guilt.  I told myself serving God had to come first, and I assumed the tension in my home was a quiet contest between God and my family as if every hour I gave them was an hour taken from Him.

It took me longer than I would like to admit to see that I had been asking the wrong question.  The choice was never God or my family.  The real question was how to bring more of God into my family.  Maybe you have felt that same pull; the sense that time spent loving the people in front of you is somehow borrowed from something holier.  It is an honest feeling, and a heavy one.  But it rests on a quiet lie: that devotion to God and devotion to the people He gave us are two separate accounts, and every deposit in one is a withdrawal from the other.

Scripture never draws that line.  When God gave His people the heart of the law, to love Him with all their heart, soul, and strength, He did not leave that love hanging in the air.  In the very next breath, He told them where it was meant to live at home and on the road, at bedtime and at sunrise, repeated again and again to their children, tied to their hands and kept before their eyes.  Loving God with everything and pouring Him into our children were never competing commands.  They were one command.  The kitchen table, the car ride, the goodnight.  The ordinary hours I thought were pulling me away from God are exactly the places He asked me to carry Him.

Still, a fair question remains: where do we find enough to keep pouring?  On the days I am tired, I do not feel like a wellspring.  This is where the Good News steadies us.  We do not pour from ourselves.  We pour from what we have first received.

Jesus said, “For even the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve others and to give his life as a ransom for many.”  (Mark 10:45, NLT) He did not love us from a safe distance.  He came near, knelt low, and poured out His own life so that we would never run dry.  Every time we serve the people under our roof, we are not manufacturing love.  We are passing along love that was poured into us first.

That reframes everything for me.  Helping my grandchildren, showing up for my children, doing the unglamorous work of simply being present.  None of it is a detour from serving God.  It is one of the truest forms of it.  My church will always be my church.  But the mission field closest to me has my last name.  So, the goal is no longer to guard my time from my family in God’s name.  It is to pour into them, patiently and daily, until they see Him at work in the ordinary moments we share.  Not because I lectured them but because they watched grace move through an imperfect grandfather who kept showing up.

Where has serving the people closest to you begun to feel like a distraction from God, when it may be the very place He has asked you to carry Him?  And who is watching your ordinary days more closely than you realize?

My prayer is we are thankful for God for pouring into us long before we knew how much we needed it.  Father, teach us to stop dividing our love for You from our love for the people in our care.  Fill us again on the days we feel empty and let those closest to us see You at work in the way we serve them.  Amen.