When Neighbors Take Marriage and The Home Seriously

I would like to welcome my husband Landon to our blog. Landon, thank you for your contributions to our family blog….

When Neighbors Take Marriage and The Home Seriously

We are fortunate to live in a neighborhood of midtown Jackson where we are literally surrounded by church members and close friends. We can step out on our back screened porch to see the porches of four different families from our church. In fact, one of our next door neighbors is a family of one of the pastors in our church. They are our family’s dearest friends, entertainers, counselors, babysitters, and playmates. They are just flat out great neighbors; all twelve of them.

While Ross and his wife Kathy have ten children (2 boys and 8 girls), they also counsel the majority of couples (including us) in our church before marriage. One of the reasons Ross is our church’s go-to guy for pre-marital counseling is because he clearly explains how marriage between man and woman reflects Christ’s love for his church (Eph. 5). And not only is this topic one that I have heard him talk about at church or in counseling sessions but again and again, I have heard the theological significance of marriage and children brought up at dinner as our family sat around the already crowded table in our pastor’s dining room. Each time, it’s a topic that garners rolled eyes and huffed breaths from the teenagers as they listen to the shtick that they have heard time and time again from their relentless dad. But they listened more than I thought.

A few weeks ago, their middle school daughter’s birthday was coming up and she was told she could have two friends over to spend the night. She attends public school in Jackson and had befriended two sisters whose parents were going through a divorce. So Ross and Kathy’s daughter, as winsome as she is funny and sometimes dramatic, asked if she could have the two girls over because she wanted them to see what a normal family looked like. As I stood in the backyard hitting a tennis ball back and forth while Eli ran back and forth like a ball boy at Wimbledon, I asked her about her birthday sleepover. As she began to talk, I listened to her desire to bring these two girls into a loving home that she had experienced her whole life. How precious it was to hear her describe how what she had seen and heard from her parents created in her a desire for others to experience the same. While she didn’t say it explicitly, what she had seen and experienced from her parents was a microcosm of the self-giving love that exists within God himself, a love that forever draws others deeper into its perfect communion.

                                 

Those few moments of conversation while playing backyard tennis reminded me the importance of teaching in our home. Deuteronomy 6 emphasizes constant teaching for a reason. Our children are listening and watching. What we believe and cherish most deeply will play out in our bodies, just as Jesus said. And they will likely play out in our children’s bodies too. And we desire what is played out will match what is described and proscribed in the Scriptures. I just hope Eli and Madi would experience God’s self-giving, inclusive love in our home that they too desire to bring others into it, just as our next door neighbors have demonstrated so well.