I was 12 or 13 when it happened.
For the first time I realized God cared about what I was doing with my life.
It was after I returned from a trip to the beach with a friend and her family. We had so much fun and came back with sun kissed skin and huge smiles to prove it. While at the beach we stayed in a high rise condo of her grandmother’s. Looking out one side you could see the ocean—out the other, a parking lot. I’m not sure why we did this—but in passing the time we decided it would be a good idea to throw a few things down on a car below. We dug for whatever we could find in the kitchen that we didn’t want to eat, and had at it. After dropping the last sardine on the car below, a woman rounded the corner and yelled up at us—mortified.
I would love to tell you that the epiphany happened right then and there and we ran down and cleaned off the woman’s car. Nope. It wasn’t until I got home and my dad learned what happened.
I’m not sure if I’d never been asked this before or if it was just the first time I heard him ask the question . .But he asked me what I thought Jesus would think of what I did to this poor woman?
Gee, I thought, it was bad enough knowing what my dad thought—
I love this from Ann Voskamp:
One of the most destructive attitudes in society today is that family is a noun … and not a verb.
Family is a verb. Family is an action.
And we aren’t merely born into families, families are born out of our reaching out and holding on and serving anyways and giving always. Giving always.
It’s not only the blood in our veins that make us family — it’s the blood and sacrifice in our days that makes us a family.
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