Where do do you belong?

Families can provide the nurture and love which promotes holistic well being and launches us into life.

It is to our detriment as individuals and to the world when family living is dysfunctional according to the loving plan of God.

Families can be the building blocks of a caring, well ordered and peaceful world where the needs of all are met. But what should good family life look like? Or to put it another way, what is God’s plan for family living?

In Genesis we read

“God created man in the image of himself,

in the image of God he created him,

Male and female he created them.” Gen. 1:27

And again, “This is why a man leaves his father and mother and joins himself to his wife, and they become one body.” Gen: 2 24

Jesus refers to these verses when questioned about divorce in Matthew’s Gospel. Matt: 19. 4-6 and concludes, “They are no longer two, therefore, but one body. So then, what God has united man must not divide.”

 And so we see marriage in God’s plan is between one man and one woman in a lifelong and exclusive loving union which welcomes children.

In a loving stable family children grow and start out in life to become all they can be with a good sense of their personal self worth.

In the Gospel this Sunday after the baptism of Jesus we catch a glimpse of the Trinity.

 “While Jesus after his own baptism was at prayer, heaven opened and the Holy Spirit descended on him in bodily shape, like a dove. And a voice came from heaven, You are my Son, the Beloved: my favour rests on you.” (Luke 3:15-16, 21 -22)

Christians become members of God’s family through baptism with the pouring of the water and the words, “I baptise you in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.”

When we receive the Holy Spirit at Baptism and are made adopted sons and daughters of God.

Baptised members of families are animated by the Holy Spirit, fully functioning and life transforming – and world transforming.  

The sense and reality of belonging to the divine family is shown by Christians in making the sign of the cross. The most powerful sign of love there is. The cross makes authentic family life and marriage possible and is a pathway to the heavenly family to which all who profess the name of Jesus are bound.