Child of God

Yesterday I talked about Wading in the Water.  Check out that chorus again:

Wade in the WaterWater in the Water, children.Wade in the Water,God's a-gonna trouble the water.

I was at a meeting last night.  The leader of the committee said that, "It is easy to be a child of God."  Is that really true?

It has been said that when my older sons prays, it is as if he his crawling into God's lap and talking to him. To me, that is a great image of one of the aspects of being a child of God.  We are pulled into the Creator's "lap" and loved.  That aspect might have been what the leader of the committee was talking about last night.

But consider again the verse from yesterday's post:

Or don’t you know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were therefore buried with him through baptism into death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life.  (Romans 6:3-4).  

We are children of God - we are children who have been buried with Christ and have been baptized not only into new life, but into Christ's death - into the suffering of Christ.

To be a child of God isn't just the time spent in God's lap, loved.  It is also the time spent seeing other children of God with the Father's eyes.  Our lives are not made easy by our adoption.  God stirs up the water and as God's children, we are called to wade in.  To be a child means that, like Jesus' disciples after the Transfiguration, we have to leave the mountain.

Kermit says, "It's not easy being green."  Kermit can't escape being green - he IS green, and it's not easy. We can't escape being children of God (if we would want to), and I don't think it's easy.