Room for one more
This time of year we fill our calendars with favorite traditions—baking cookies, seeing Christmas lights, decorating trees and gingerbread houses, singing carols, snuggling up for Christmas movies. In all the fun of the season, though, I wonder if there is a particular temptation to make an idol of the truly good and gracious gift of “precious family memories.”
From the beginning the nuclear family was never about its own joy and purposes, an insular end unto itself. When God first introduces the idea of the family in Gen. 3, it is with the purpose of bringing his restoration to the entire cosmos. He says to that old serpent, the Deceiver: “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring; he shall crush your head, and you shall bruise his heel” (Gen. 3:15). Families—a people spanning generations—would be the means by which God would bring into this shattered world the One who would crush the serpent.
In the gospels, we see Jesus, the fulfillment of the promise in Gen. 3, continually turned the idea of family on its head. For example, in Matthew 12, Jesus’s mother and brothers are standing outside the place where he was teaching, waiting to speak with him. When someone taps him on the shoulder to let him know, he replies, “‘Who is my mother and who are my brothers?’ And stretching out his hand toward his disciples, he said, “Here are my mother and my brothers! For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother (Matt. 12:46-50)’”.
He also says in Mark 10:
“Truly, I say to you, there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or lands, for my sake and for the gospel, who will not receive a hundredfold now in this time, houses and brothers and sisters and mothers and children and lands, with persecutions, and in the age to come eternal life (Mark 10:29-30)”.
Sam Allberry, an author and a single man who writes often about God’s re-definition of the family, expanded on this passage in an article for Plough Quarterly, saying:
“‘God sets the lonely in families’ (Ps. 68:6). It’s easy to read a verse like that and think, ‘Aw. It’s so nice that God does that.’ But the fact is, it’s actually deeply challenging, because we are the families of Psalm 68 in which God is placing the lonely. We are the mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, and sons and daughters that Jesus is promising in Mark 10. It makes Jesus’ promise quite unusual: there’s a sense in which it depends on us to fulfill it. Those who would otherwise be alone are grafted into the community life of his people. When God draws people to himself, he draws them to one another as well. The people of Jesus Christ are to be family.”
God continues to give families the purpose of joining him in pushing back the evil of this world and laboring toward the renewal of all things, but the wide-open arms of Jesus have expanded the vision of what family is meant to be in his coming kingdom. There is something more potent, more powerful, more glorious than the good gift of the nuclear family—the unlikely family of God’s redeemed ones.
Matt and I have talked so often in the past few years about how to lead our family of six into this call of “welcoming one another as Christ has welcomed you, for the glory of God” (Rom. 15). My imagination tends to instinctively go big with it, fixating on the big feast with all the trimmings and trappings. And we do love packing our small house to the gills on All Saints Day and kids’ birthdays and Peach Cobbler Day (a high holy day of our own making) and taco nights. But where does that leave me on an ordinary Wednesday when my energy is at a low ebb, but we still desire to live into this calling to be not just a family of six, but brothers and sisters of a greater family that will last forever?
We have a magic phase that has helped us to uncomplicate this offering of welcome in this season of little kids and full schedules.
We look at the things we’re already planning on doing as a family, and ask: “Can we make room for just one more?”
Here’s how this question could look in this Advent and Christmas season:
If you know your family is going to bake Christmas cookies come hell or high water, but the idea of putting together a cookie exchange as you have in years past sounds overwhelming, why not invite the kind woman who smiles at your kids on Sundays but whose own family lives far away to join you to bake cookies?
If your family loves to drive around looking for Christmas lights while drinking hot chocolate, why not invite your single neighbor to squeeze in the middle seat?
If you’re having a Christmas movie marathon, why not invite the friend who is worn down from a hard year?
If you’re headed to see the lights at the zoo anyway, why not buy two extra tickets and invite the older couple who have no grandkids of their own to share in the joy of your little ones?
If you’re already planning on lighting your advent wreath each Sunday evening of December, why not invite a friend who lives alone to join you for the sacredness (and let’s be honest—the chaos. It is a combination of short attention spans, fire, and eager little hands, after all), even on just one of the four nights?
In a season filled with both light and longing, laughter and loneliness, what if we welcomed others into God’s good gift of familial love and made our homes a sign of the welcome of Jesus and his coming kingdom? Our holiday traditions will be more than just treasured family memories, but instead pulsing with kingdom life as God transforms them into tangible signs of what it means that he is God with Us.