I remember getting off the airplane in Portland, Oregon.  I was 24, just returning from a year in the Philippines and 20 pounds thinner than when I had left.  Being 6’1” and weighing 145 pounds was not a status I had ever coveted.  It was a recent bout with hepatitis that had chiseled away at my already lean frame.

My father was waiting for me at the end of the jet way. (Those were the days when friends and family could actually meet you at the gate.) Dad was always a rock emotionally—steady as the ocean waves on a sun-drenched beach. I’d only seen him cry twice In my life, once when we were alone in the car and he got to talking about the good men he knew who had been killed in WWII and the other when I asked him about his mother who had died when he was sixteen. 

As I wearily made my way up the jet way, I could see him standing against the wall opposite my gate.  He had that oh-so-familiar kind, gentle smile as he scanned the disembarking crowd.  Then he spotted me…and his face changed.  I saw my father fight back tears for the third time in my life.  But this time, I realized, I was the cause. 

Something else happened in that moment as he wrapped his strong arms around this adult son and gave me a deeply heartfelt hug: I realized I had not been hugged in a year’s time by anyone.  And for the first time I also realized the importance of something I’d always taken for granted—being physically embraced by people who really know and love you.

Over the next month or so, I hope we’ll all grow a bit in knowing just how important it is to live in the strong hug…the embrace…the grip of the God who knows and loves us.  Throughout this coming year, we’ll punctuate our systematic study of different books of the Bible with short sidebars about different gripping attributes of our amazing God. 

Every attribute of God has the potential to be yet another loving embrace from our living Lord.  Entitled “Living in the Grip of God,” this intermittent journey will hopefully help us experience what it means to live in the grip of things like God’s faithfulness, His justice, His grace, His patience and a host of other God-abundant qualities of His character. 

This Sunday, August 21^st, we’ll be starting a look at “Living in the Grip of God’s Holiness” with a message entitled, “The Happiness of Holiness.”  That word “holiness” itself makes most of us a little uncomfortable.  But my hope and prayer is that because of this journey we will take together around God’s holiness, we will all become far happier people at far deeper levels than we ever imagined.   

So experience God this Sunday at 10:00 a.m. as we experience the happiness of holiness in the grip of God’s greatness.

Enjoying His embrace,

Pastor John