Perhaps the worst feeling in the world, is to have no place to call home.  Even for the Israelites who wandered through the dessert without a home had each other, they had a sense of belonging; being part of God's special people.  Although Paul wrote these words in Ehpesians 2 about 2,000 years ago, they still have relevant good news to our modern, disposable, transient socieity.

They say that the world is "getting smaller", that we are more and more of a gloabal community because of the ease with which we can move from place to place and the speed with which we can communicate through devices such as the internet.  Ironically, this has not drawn us closer to each other, but has served to further isolate us.  Don Henly wrote in his song "Down At the Sunset Grill" these words; "These days a man makes you something, and you never see his face."  We have become a global community of strangers!

My family feels this in special ways; we accept a call to a church and we enter as strangers; we must leave our friends and live as strangers in an unfamiliar community.  We live in a house we do not own and will some day leave behind.  Sometimes we are called to live isolated from family, and the friendships we do manage to forge are often ripped away from us when it is time to move on.

But to those of us who feel like we have no place to belong, God uses the Bible to say; "even though you once didn't belong anywhere, you are now part of a larger community, the family of God!  You are my people, you are family to each other!"

Thanks be to God who adopts us as members of the family of God!