Keeping the Table Extended
Last week we received difficult news as a family. We were given the news that our wonderful, bright, energetic and loving almost-teenager was unwell – the cancer that has been part of his life for three years now, and has twice been treated with the strongest of treatments, has returned once again and this time there is no treatment that will make it go away. We are gradually taking in the reality of this…
One night last week we had some friends from church round for dinner. Our kitchen isn’t particularly big but our table is! It has two extra sections for extending its length to be able to seat up to 12 people at a squeeze. Last week we added one extra section and had 9 around the table. It was noisy! We had been looking forward to doing this for a while and it was just what we had been hoping for! When our friends went home we pondered whether or not to reduce the table in size but my heart told me to keep it extended…
You see, as a family we’ve been on a journey of God reframing our imagination for what it looks like for us to be part of God’s mission. Over several years God has been showing us what it means to live as family on mission – a family “moving forward in mission as a pack, as a covenant family with a kingdom mission” (Mike and Sally Breen – Family on Mission). For us as an immediate family this means that we believe that the six of us have a shared mission – we are called to be part of God’s mission as a family. It also goes wider than that – we believe that churches serve God’s mission best when they also live as family on mission. This involves a shift in thinking, away from living lives as individual Christians who meet up at church on Sunday and run church programmes together, towards living as an extended family, listening to God and asking the Spirit to show us the shared places we are being called to.
We always imagined that for us, living as family on mission involved inviting people into our lives and our home as part of the family, building meaningful real community where people, both those who are part of a church community and those who aren’t, can find hope and healing in Jesus. Living as family on mission hasn’t quite worked out how we had hoped over the last few years. Life has been smaller, our home has been more private, we’ve had to batten down the hatches and keep colds and sickness out to protect our son for the long run. In the last few months as he recovered from his most recent bone marrow transplant we had started to relax, started to think and pray again about the possibilities… We looked at the patterns of our week and picked a night of the week to set aside to invite people over to sit around the table with us.
Who would have thought that the news we received about our son last week would come on exactly the same week when we were starting to live hopefully into these new patterns of life as family on mission? As we’ve tried to process the enormity of the news we received last week there is one thing that we know for sure… we’re keeping the table extended. We have no idea what this looks like… For the time being we can have well people in our home and we will continue to do this for as long as we can. Thankfully keeping the table extended is not limited to the physical reality of our wooden kitchen table and the actual act of having people in our home – it goes beyond that to walks in the park, the school gate, coffee shops, hospital wards and more… We hope we will approach the weeks and months ahead listening out for God at work in our everyday reality and trying with whatever strength we have, to join in. We trust that with God’s help we will know how to do this.
