It was a Kingdom come kind of day. 25 people gathered - mainstream white, Latino gangsters and Lummi Nation who are becoming sons and daughters, ex-offenders from prison, rappers and worship leaders - all seeking to connect more deeply to the Father heart of God.
People talked about their relationships with their own dads and how that has affected their relating to God as Father, then forgave their dads. We talked about how our experience of the reconciling work of Jesus begins in the places where we need to be reconciled with one another - when we forgive as our heavenly Father forgives we are becoming children of God. As we walk in this, we see our need to be reconciled with our heavenly Father.
At the end of our time one young man spoke up about feeling deeply and painfully alone. As he shared his pain, these gangsters and others admitted their own aloneness and came around him to pray with and for him. "No one has ever seen God. But if we love each other, God lives in us, and his love is brought to full expression in us." (1 John 4:12) What seemed, initially, to take us back a step from all we had been talking about actually moved us out of our individual attempts to experience a deeper connection with the Father to experiencing a deeper sense of our adoption by connecting to our family through one expressing their need.
It was a beautiful moment. One said, "Healing is cool thing to see and other signs of the Kingdom breaking in, but this is the greatest sign when the children are loving one another."
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