The Kingdom of Heaven Begins at Home

I’m seated at a long table with women from my community, some facing me, others beside me, all of us with cups of coffee and little squares or cookies and our Bibles open.

Our children are in the room next door in the basement of this Christian Reformed Church which my husband and I attended for four years upon first moving to this tiny Dutch hamlet in northern Alberta.

We’re trying to ignore the crying of babies and the screaming of toddlers and to focus on our Coffee Break lesson these few minutes we have together.

It’s all about calling, this lesson, and how Mary was called to be a mother of Jesus and Elizabeth to be the mother of John the Baptist, how angels made these missions so very clear. How their calling became so much more than raising a child – how it was about offering up one’s heart, like Abraham did Isaac, to the will of a Father whose plans are much bigger than our own, whose dreams require sacrifice and humility.

We look at one another around our mugs of coffee, as the leader asks the question, “Have you ever felt God call you to do something in your own life?”

Small obedience

My friend says she wishes an angel would show up and tell her clearly what to do. Then she turns to me and says, “Emily, did you receive a calling to start the Lulu Tree?”

She’s referring to my non-profit in Africa, and I swallow my bit of brownie and nod.

“Yes. It was very clear one evening after returning from my first trip. But even though the command was so clear, the calling began years earlier I think – you know, it starts in the small things, in the small obedience’s.”

I tell them how all I wanted for years was to be famous. To be known. To be called to something important and impressive because I was so insecure in myself.

Then I moved home to care for a mother with brain cancer, and I had children, and we took in foster kids, and my dreams got covered up with peanutbutter kisses and loads of laundry.

But one day, as I was washing my mother’s feet, her smile falling on me like a soft shawl, I felt the Lord’s love enclose me and I knew in that moment that this was the place he would have me – this was the place of his pleasure. This place of serving.

And on those days when serving is hard I think of the quote on my desk by Hudson Taylor: “God chose me because I was weak enough. God does not do his great works by large committees. He trains somebody to be quiet enough, and little enough, and then uses him.”

As we exit the room to gather our children, wrapping them in their winter things, their soft cheeks pressed against ours as we walk home in the snow with their arms wrapped around our necks, God’s pleasure is there – his pleasure in us choosing love, every day, in the small things.

Because the kingdom of heaven begins at home.