The privilege of the Dudley family

Listening to a sermon yesterday about the privileges that are afforded to me because of my position as a son of God, and taking in picture after picture of a family that is trying to model their lives after the Savior, I felt something deep in my soul. It was so deep I wept (thank God the lights were down - no one needs to see that!). I realized something maybe for the first time or maybe for the hundredth time: being a member of the Dudley family has it privileges.

I am not talking about the one I currently head, but the one I came from. You see, that one, the one I spent over 24 years of my life most intimately tied to, found me in a most excellent state. That place, that home, was built by nothing more than my parents' humble submission to God. It was marked by flaws (like my family is), but those imperfections drove them not further from me, but closer to me through their reliance on God. At a young age they introduced me to the Savior and made sure that I intersected with people who loved God and others. They prayed for me, scolded me, trained me, and sacrificed for me so excellently that, when I looked around me (especially in college) at people that were not as privileged as I, it was then I fully realized what their hands, their faith, had built.

They invited me to pray and I never took them up on that invitation as much as I should have. But they knew, they knew, that the invitations should never cease because of my stubbornness and downright insolence at times. As they toiled they produced in me a hunger for a relationship with God through Jesus Christ. That hunger reached a fever pitch just before my Senior year in high school and culminated in my acceptance of Jesus as the leader of my life and the forgiver of my sins my Freshman year in college. They knew what they were doing for it was done with the blessing and in the power of God himself. No one but him was their passion and pursuit and it set my heart on fire for him. It truly did and does today.

I cannot even fathom where I would be, where my family would be, without the grace and love of God. It was that grace, that love, that empowered my mom and dad to have pursued me like he does and to purse him still. Yes, I am a product of their love for him and the overflowing of that love into my life. And there it is! That is where I come from! This is where I am going! My past and future cannot be disconnected. They are one in the same: a straight, unbroken line of love. 

Of Love.

Forward. Forward I go longing for my home in heaven. Yet when I look back I see nothing save what God has wrought in me through what he had wrought in them. Being a part of the Dudley family has its privileges. And thanks be to God that he put me right in the middle of it.