Andrew Stewart is a video wizard who works for the local media company, Dust of the Ground. More importantly he has been a husband to Megan for nearly 3 years and soon to be father to a little baby girl. Andrew has been a missionary member with us since 2007. In his spare time Andrew loves a good bike ride.
I love my friends. I love people who get me, know me, and are easy to talk with. I like people who like riding bikes, college football, craft beer, and the Whig. One of my best friends (my wife Megan) and I love to have brunch when we get the chance and throw some records on our record player and relax and talk for hours. It’s awesome to share interests with people and to feel like someone gets you. My wife and I are going to be having a baby girl this fall and I already find myself hoping that my daughter will share some of the same interests that I do when she gets older. What if she doesn’t like brunch? I usually get to pick my friends and that usually comes out of a shared interest pool, but I don’t even know what my daughter will like or dislike.
“Why do I feel this way?” is something I have been thinking about. I have a tendency to want to be around people who are like me and will tell me how great I am because of the similarities we share. But when I stop and think about some of the people who have helped me grow and follow Jesus more deeply over the years, a lot of them are the ones I didn’t seek out on my own based on our common interests. We are not guaranteed a daughter born just like her family, but does that mean she would be any less a part of our family? We see in Galatians that when we join the family of God we are adopted into a family of a lot of people unlike us but ultimately become one despite the things that we do or like.
“In Christ Jesus you are all sons of God, through faith. For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. And if you are Christ’s, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to promise.” (Galatians 3:26-29)
It has been frustratingly rewarding to have developed relationships in our church with people who I wouldn’t naturally gravitate towards since becoming a part of Midtown back in 2007. One specific relationship that comes to mind is a now dear friend who is drastically different from me. He is proudly conservative, extroverted, prefers wine to beer, and usually thinks the opposite of what I think about sports, theology, and other hotly debated topics. I remember leaving my first few conversations with him thinking “Well, that was painful, he’s convinced I’m crazy”. However, I found that the longer we talked, the more we learned about each other, and the more we were growing in our love of Christ, we gradually developed this understanding that it was ok to disagree about some of the petty things and sometimes even things that seemed to be a big deal to us because of the way that Christ has reconciled us to one another. We have freedom to speak into each others lives and try to point one another towards Christ and away from our sins and shortcomings, rather than let our differences keep us from being family.
I believe being part of church family is more than just sharing the things you have in common. I believe that Jesus loves the Jew and the Gentile alike and that we should follow Him in that way. So what if my daughter doesn’t end up liking brunch? She will be loved by my wife and me simply because she is a part of the family and because we want to love her the way that Jesus loves his family.
