Late Night Thoughts
What is it like to live your wildest dream?
Your heart can’t keep up—it’s bursting. You wake to the sunrise, peering out the window to the sound of kids laughing and chicks peeping. The coffee pours, the bread rises in that perfect morning window. Your mind races as the coffee works its magic, but with the creak of an old door opening, your heart finds peace.
I’m living a dream. God keeps bringing saints into our lives—left and right. Old connections spark anew. Conversations unfold with people we never thought would embrace the things of God. Our kids make friends with children raised in godly homes by parents striving to live out the Word. Playdates, ice cream dates, pool dates, play-in-the-dirt dates—moments that bind us together.
Twenty-six people gather for Bible study, diving into Ephesians to sift through God’s Word. Our small farmhouse can’t hold us all, so we spill outside, braving mosquito bites because that’s what God’s people do in the moment. Kids chase each other, playing duck, duck, goose and t-ball, squeezing the chicks a little too tightly as the sun dips low. It grows too dark to read our Bibles, and with no outdoor lights, we linger in the twilight. Teens entertain toddlers; pre-teens adore infants. This is community. This is Christian community.
I’m living a dream. What a joy, what a gift, to welcome old friends, family, and new faces into this humble home. What a privilege to open the Bible and speak freely of God. What a glorious sight to watch Him weave so many lives together here. After every Bible study or Sunday meal, I find myself tearing up, overwhelmed with awe and gratitude. Look what God has done. Look at His kindness.
Yes, we’ve known pain and sorrow, but we know—without a doubt—God is with us through it all. When you truly believe you deserve death, yet God in His kindness gives you life and work to do—everything you do and say, every way you spend your time—flows from an overflow of love for Him.
Ephesians 2:1–10 (ESV)
1–3 And you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience—among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind.
4–7 But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved— and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus.
8–9 For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast.
10 For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.
