The Family You Make of Us
One evening, gathered around a dinner table with friends, Greg Jordan bowed his head to pray. In the middle of his prayer, he said something that has stayed with me ever since. He prayed, “Thank you, Father, for the family you make of us.”
That simple line carried the weight of the Gospel: How Jesus, in His life, death, and resurrection, creates something altogether new—a family knit not by bloodlines or last names, but by the Spirit of God.
But let’s be honest, sometimes that sounds a little nebulous. For most of us, daily life is consumed with our actual families: kids who need to be fed, work deadlines that won’t wait, endless practices and appointments. The idea of some larger, spiritual family can feel abstract, tucked away in Sunday prayers but hard to see in the rush of a Tuesday afternoon.
And yet, if we pay attention, we catch glimpses of it. If we live into the mission of God, we witness moments that break through the ordinary and show us just how real and beautiful this family is.
I witnessed one of those glimpses at The Diaper Project this past month.
For a year now, a woman has come faithfully each month to pick up free diapers. She rearranges her work schedule so she can be with us, because it’s not just the diapers she’s after, but the people, the prayers, and the warmth of belonging. Every month, a volunteer carries her supplies to the car and prays with her.
Last month, she came at the very end, breathless and heavy with stress. Most of the volunteers had already packed up. She tried to hold it together, but when someone asked how she was doing, the tears spilled out. We sat with her as she poured out the story: a car wreck, insurance delays, rental cars, and bills piling up. She kept repeating that her faith, and her family’s faith, were being tested to the breaking point.
While she spoke, a few volunteers who had been cleaning up nearby quietly gathered some cash to help. The next day, I met her to pay for her rental car from our Outreach funds. I told her it wasn’t a gift from me, but a gift from the whole church. I told her, “This is God’s family taking care of God’s family.”
She began to cry again. And then she said, “Did you know I used to go to your church for years?”
I was startled. She told me she had once been a caregiver for Dr. Harris Lake Smith, a longtime parishioner at All Saints. Every Sunday for a decade, she brought him to church, sat with him through the liturgy, and drove him home for lunch. Over the years, he became like family to her and she to him. He bought gifts for her children, they cooked meals for him, they ate together in his living room, and his family invited her family on vacations. They took care of one another in the way only family can. Though they came from different backgrounds, races, neighborhoods, and life experiences, the love they shared in Christ forged a bond that transcended any earthly difference. When Harris Lake died, she came to his funeral. His passing had devastated her.
And yet, here she was years later, being carried once more by the family that God had given her. By the mysterious work of the Holy Spirit, the love and care that Harris Lake and his family had poured into her life did not end with his death but was taken up and continued by the Body of Christ. In that moment, I could see how God’s family extends beyond time, beyond loss, beyond what we can imagine. Ministry begun by one person is carried forward by others, woven together across years and generations, unbroken even by death.
As Father Wes said in his sermon two weeks ago:
“A new family is being formed…something new and radical is here. Something that relativizes father and son, mother and daughter. Something that destroys the wall of hostility that separates all these warring factions that surround us in this world. And it’s called the Kingdom of God. The Body of Christ. The Temple of the Holy Spirit.”
What could have been a simple transaction of free diapers became a living example of the new family God is making. The story of this woman, carried by the love that began with Dr. Smith and now continues through the church, shows how this new and radical thing did not end with his passing. It found new life through the Body of Christ. In this way, the family God makes of us extends beyond our sight, and our simple acts of love become threads in an unbroken tapestry of God’s Kingdom.
This is the mystery of the Kingdom of God: a love that endures, a family that outlasts our mortal limits, a presence that transforms ordinary acts of care into eternal bonds. When we serve, when we gather, when we love as Christ loved, we are participating in something far greater than ourselves. We are living into a new and radical world, a Kingdom that cannot be undone.
Thank you, Lord, for the family you make of us. For the hands that carry us when we cannot stand, for the hearts that bear our burdens when we are weak, and for the unbroken, eternal love that binds us together in Christ.