🙌It's the Friday Call to Worship!🙌

I am surrounded by piles of boxes as I write. My family is moving in three days - just 20 minutes up the freeway to reduce our cost of living. We are leaving the house where our church was born, and where our sons learned to walk, swim and shave. I’ve been asked more than once if I felt emotional about it, but I am surprisingly unattached to these walls that have witnessed so much wonder.

I think God has used hard seasons of life to give me the gift of uprootedness. He was there, lovingly uprooting what I knew about safety, belonging and identity. He was there when my childhood home burned down, when I lived alone in rural South Africa, and when corruption “blacklisted” me for seven years and kept me from my family overseas.

Don’t get me wrong. Sentiment is certainly not a bad thing. My natural tendency, however, was to put too much of me into people and places. My loving Father didn’t want me to miss something greater, so He used (not created) these hardships for good. (Romans 8:28) I wouldn’t have learned to seek God until I found Him (Jeremiah 29:13) or to set my heart on the journey toward Him (Psalm 84:5). I might have never known how to reconcile a broken world and a good, good Father. (Romans 8:18-39)

God has used the trials of this lifetime to forge roots that run deeper than time itself. My roots are in the Family of God, and they are eternal.

Hebrews 11 highlights the lineage we are grafted into as children of God. We are temporary residents on earth. If we put our hope in this world, we are set up for disappointment and prone to wandering. When we tap into our true identities, we “desire a better place - a heavenly one”. (Hebrews 11:13-16) And doesn’t it always come back to what we really, truly desire?

Let’s return our affections to Him - our forever home and loving Father. Sing loud and proud to declare where your roots run. Listen to “Roots” by Jamie MacDonald.