To listen to today’s reflection as a podcast, click here
Each day this month of August we’ll be looking at one of the extraordinary metaphors that the Bible uses to illustrate the nature of our relationship with God.
“For years, I felt a hole in my heart,” said Meena Geltink, a 43-year-old mother of three in the Netherlands.
Meena takes great joy in her present family. But whenever she thought of her family of origin back in India, it felt as if something was missing.
She never got to know her parents. She never knew if she had any siblings. She had been left at an orphanage while still an infant, only to be adopted by a loving Dutch family and relocated to northern Europe.
Meena was a teenager in 1996 when she attended a gathering of adopted children. She felt drawn to another native-born Indian, a teenage girl named Minal Tijssen, who had also been welcomed into a loving Dutch home. Their friends couldn’t help but notice their resemblance. The girls decided to exchange addresses.
For 15 years they sustained a correspondence, jokingly calling each other “sis.” During the 15 years that followed, they gradually lost touch.
Then, seemingly out of the blue, everything changed.
Minal, who is 44, a mother of two, and is now a citizen of France, had also felt a deep, heartfelt loneliness concerning her roots. All she knew is that her parents had left her at an orphanage when she was very young. Last April, on a whim, she took a MyHeritage DNA test. The results yielded an exceedingly rare 100% sibling match.
The name that appeared on her screen was Meena’s.
“We were friends before we were sisters,” she marveled. “We were sisters the whole time, but didn’t know.”
The two young moms reunited in the Netherlands just two weeks ago – a meeting marked by hugs, tears, laughter, and incredulity. They had grown up just 60 miles apart. Meena (she’s on the left in the picture above) declared that the reunion was “like a missing puzzle piece has been found.” Then she said to Minal, “When I see you, it’s like I’m home.”
Friendship is a treasure. When Jesus declares that we are his friends, as we noted yesterday, he is bestowing upon us a great honor.
But that’s just the start. We are more than just friends of the heart with the Son of God. We are also his siblings – which makes us, automatically, brothers and sisters with each other.
Pet adoption agencies advertise the joy of helping dogs and cats find their “forever families.” In the case of Christians, that’s literally true. We’re adopted by grace into a new set of relationships – one that will become infinitely richer when we experience the healing and wholeness promised in the next world.
During Bible times, families were regarded as almost sacred relational webs. No one seriously questioned that loyalty to parents, grandparents, siblings, and children came before almost everything else.
That’s why a remark that Jesus once made about the identity of his own family no doubt raised a lot of eyebrows.
In Matthew 12:48-50, someone in Jesus’ crowd of listeners informs him that his mother and brothers are looking for him. He can now do what a “virtuous person” would surely do – excuse himself to see if there is an important matter to which he must attend.
Instead, he stretches out his hand toward his disciples and says, “Here are my mother and my brothers! For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother.”
In the minds of many listeners, this would have sounded like social anarchy – and a violation of the commandment to honor one’s father and mother to boot.
But Jesus is casting a revolutionary vision for a new kind of family – a set of loyalties and responsibilities that supersede even those connected with our chromosomes.
To top it off, we find this statement in Hebrews 2:11:
“Both the one who makes people holy and those who are made holy are of the same family. So Jesus is not ashamed to call them brothers and sisters.”
To translate that statement from the first century to the 21st, Jesus would not be ashamed to place you in the front row of his annual family Christmas photo – the one that includes Uncle Fred and the dog.
Does it feel as if there’s a hole in your heart?
It’s not too late to discover that if you’ve given yourself to Jesus, you’ve become a part of God’s forever family.
And now you get to meet your incredible sisters and brothers.