When your family doesn’t care about your resume…
Tags: Christmas, Resume, Jesus, Family, Identity

Small town family. Big town resume. Important lesson about God.

Then Jesus told them, “A prophet is honored everywhere except in his own hometown and among his relatives and his own family.” Mark‬ ‭6:4‬ ‭NLT‬‬

For the one who moved off far from home and family, returning to visit is always an interesting experience. Whether it is positive or negative, it will never be dull.

I grew up in a very small town (<1000 people) in rural Missouri. My family is mostly farmers and blue collar workers. I graduated with 30 other students in my class at the only school around.

This used to bother me. But on this trip, I made a realization that flipped my paradigm upside down.

College took me a whole 2.5 hours away, which to my classmates basically made me a world traveler. Not to be outdone however, upon college graduation (already a feat for someone from my town), I promptly moved to the literal other side of the planet and spent 4 years living in India.

I worked in a cultural exchange program. I worked as a foreign retail supplier relations agent. I was a sourcing agent for a coffee company. I coached college basketball and professional football (in India). I toured the country on a motorcycle and took solo trips to island countries in the Indian Ocean. The Middle East, Europe, Southeast Asia…I visited them all, multiple times.

Eventually I moved back to the US, to a mid size town in Arkansas. A few years down the road I was married and had started two different companies that grew during the strange, strange year of 2020.

But coming back to small town Missouri to spend time with family has always been…normal. No one asks about my adventures. No one really knows what my companies do, and they don’t really even ask.

This used to bother me. But on this trip, I made a realization that flipped my paradigm upside down.

It’s true, my family doesn’t ask because they don’t really care. But that’s not because they don’t care about me; it’s because they don’t care about what I do.

What I’ve always known but never consciously realized until now is that while they surely find my flurry of activity interesting (or at least odd), it has absolutely no bearing on my place in the family.

And this is exactly how I’ve come to understand the way that the Family of God works and my place in it.

Acceptance is assumed. Everything else is just for fun.

When acceptance is assumed, you don’t have to present any type of resume. But how many of us treat both God and our families this way? “Look what I’ve done. Look what I’ve accomplished. Aren’t you impressed?” But neither God nor our families are looking at our resumes.

When acceptance is assumed, you are free to forget yourself and focus on others.

When acceptance is assumed, there is no score keeping or debts to be repaid.

When acceptance is assumed, you can rest knowing that you didn’t earn your place at the table, and therefore you can’t lose it by taking your foot off the gas.

In the Family of God, because Jesus did everything necessary to gain acceptance on behalf of all humanity, acceptance is assumed. This is the Christmas message of a god-become-man to win man back to God. This is the good news that Jesus speaks of which humanity has both ignorantly and willfully suppressed.

So if you are like me, coming home to visit family, wondering why they don’t seem as interested as you believe you are interesting, remember that acceptance is assumed, and you can rest in grateful freedom, knowing you are already in, and that everything else is just for fun.

Merry Christmas.