My brother came to stay with my family recently while he attended training in our city. While I was happy to welcome him, I worried about how we were going to survive three whole weeks under one roof. As adults, my brother and I get along well in short doses, but after a while I inevitably launch into lecturing my brother and attempting to tell him how to live his life. I mean well, but I admit it’s not an endearing quality in me. I prayed that God would help me to be a good hostess and that the weeks would go by passably. My prayers were answered in wonderfully unexpected ways.
My brother quickly blended into our family life, sharing in our nightly dinners and helping out around the house. Each night I’d find him diligently studying at the dining room table while my daughter studied downstairs. We fell into a routine, and I hadn’t picked a fight yet. While this was all well and good, God didn’t stop there.
In the last week of my brother’s training, he had one morning off. He accepted an important job interview for that morning before his final exam that afternoon. We then discovered that the interview was going to be quite lengthy. The timing was so tight that even difficulty parking would make him late for the exam and thus turned away. When we discovered there was no way around this scheduling nightmare, I invited my brother to place it all in God’s hands and let God’s plan come to be.
As it turned out, my brother had a good interview and went on to write his exam on time. (He did exceptionally well on it, too, I must boast!) That night, I asked my brother what I should write about in my next blog post. He answered without hesitation, “How God answered my prayers and stayed with me today.”
This touched my heart very deeply. My brother was a Canadian Forces soldier who fought for our country in Afghanistan. In part as a result of what he experienced during his deployment, going to church is very hard for him. In my brother’s words that night, I was reminded that while he may not be at church every week, my brother still has very real faith, and he is just as much a part of the Body of Christ as any of us who lead more active lives in the Church.
We are all a part of the Body of Christ, and God knows each one of us by name. Never was that made clearer to me than in my brother’s words that night.