Devotion

Knowing Our Village People
For if a man cannot manage his own household, how can he take care of God’s church? --- 1 Timothy 3:5

I went back home to attend my aunt's funeral service a couple of years ago. While standing on the front porch of the church, I had a conversation with a kind woman who I remembered seeing around when I was a young girl. Our spirits connected. We sat together through the service and during the repast. I learned that day that she is my second cousin! She thought I knew this until she saw the unbelievable surprise on my face! What started as a sad occasion turned into a celebration for me and my cousins. When we were children, our parents' bitterness and feuds separated us from each other until the time we reached school age. The relational bond we shared was established on the schoolyard. For months after my aunt’s service, my newly found cousin and I connected and affirmed our relationship. I think about how awesome God is to have had that occasion in time already set in place for my cousin and I to come together as family after all the years that had passed us by. It is important that we know our village - our next of kin - no matter what the circumstances. Broken links in our family line risk leaving us lost, isolated, and eventually extinct in existence, and it extends into our church family. Who be your people? You should want to know, and you need to know. Everybody belongs to somebody within the family of God.