Reflections on our review of 2014...
We started the year expecting to continue the "reckless love" theme in our lives that God had started in our hearts towards adoption years before. We had assumed that theme would be applied to the struggles of bringing a new family member in the mix and recklessly loving him until he understood what it was like to be part of a family and how it felt to be loved day in and day out. Turns out, God didn't teach us how to love that way. Not yet anyway. This past year, He taught us how to apply it in every aspect of life. To recklessly love people. All of them. To be involved in our community and church Biblically - having people in our home as much as possible, loving them through the hard times, inviting them to love us through our hard times, celebrating victories together, and serving when all we felt like doing was laying in bed and crying.
Looking back, I can already say how grateful I am for 2014. I wouldn't want to relive it. I am glad it is over. But we are not the same people we were in January of 2014. God has taught us how to be a more transparent and vulnerable with others, and He has given us a picture of what true Biblical community is all about. It hasn't been easy to let people hurt with us, but we are forever grateful for those who willingly have. It's never easy to enter into other people's hurts either, but we are thankful for what God has taught us through it and prayerful we can do better at this in 2015.
Most of all, we are thankful for a God who was willing to enter into our pain over 2,000 years ago. For a God who completely understood the messiness and pain of sin and this world, but entered into it anyways. It is only through this ultimate example of reckless love in Christ, that we have any hope for the future. And so we look forward to 2015 with much anticipation and hope ... not necessarily for what we think God will do, but because of what He has already done.
