A Place to Call Home

Right now our church is involved in a mission trip where the main project is to build a home for a family that has qualified through a special program.  The family has met a whole list of criteria for this project and they are also a family that has faced and is facing some special needs.  The mobile home they are living in, is going to be taken back by the owner when he moves back to the Rio Grande Valley from out of state.  The family also has had a child who has survived cancer and they are caring for an elderly father who is ill and blind.

Those are certainly some compelling reasons to help this family but why go all the way to the Rio Grande Valley with all of its troubles and why go to all this expense for one family?  We could stay closer to home and meet many smaller needs and touch more people.

As I have been reading through this year's Bible reading experience (or SOAP challenge) on the key characters of the Bible, I have seen more clearly than ever something of God's plan for addressing the whole world's need.  He started by working with one family - through Abraham.  Then God called him to go to place far away and there God would provide a place, a promised land and, in essence, a home.

With all the vast needs of mankind, God started with one family and in one particular place, a troubled place at that.  From human terms that does not seem very efficient nor would it seem to be very effective.  But fast forward through the centuries and we see what God did through that one family in that one place.  It was not a perfect family.  That home, that promised land, was not in a nice safe, quiet region.  Yet God brought blessing after blessing to that family and through that family in that volatile place.

Eventually he brought his son into the world through that family and in that troubled place.  His son lived his whole life there and there he died - for the whole world.  He was raised from the dead there and the Bible says, when he returns, it will be in a special way to that place.

That family that God started with has a story.  That place where God did such a work of grace in a troubled land has a story too.  In some ways that is what we are also participating in, giving a single family who follows God a place to allow God to work through them in an area that has seen - and will see - many trials.  And in all of that, we are praying that God will continue there in our day and in the days to come the ancient work of redemption he started long ago in one family in one particularly troubled place.

Even in that family and even in that place God created a place he called home.  May he do the same in our day and through our work with one family in one place.

for the journey...

Tim