Our firstborn arrived in mid April of this year, and at a little less than two weeks old he made his first appearance at church. A bit of background–though–to make sense of what follows. My wife and I spent most of the last three years in Chile, working as missionaries in the city and church where she grew up, surrounded by friends and family. We made the move to the US so that I could begin seminary, and about half-way through the MDiv we found out she was pregnant. She had always wanted to have a baby there, in Santiago, surrounded by those who had loved and cared for her since birth, surrounded by those who would love and care for our son because of who he is and who his mother was–not just because he was another cute baby.

So it was with a mixture of joy and sadness that she realized that she would walk through her pregnancy far from home, far from the support she had always envisioned having with her first. But those who we had gotten to know in our church walked alongside us, helping us and supporting us in ways that we never could have imagined. So that first Sunday, as we stood out in the lobby of the church, we were physically surrounded by people who had graciously cared for us during nine months of pregnancy, and who were now delighted to graciously care for our son. I watched as he was passed from one set of arms to another–never left alone in his first moments in the church, never knowing the church as anything but a place where warm arms held him, loved him, and eventually and reluctantly passed him on to others.

The Trinity, they say, is the pattern for our unity in the church. But what I saw that day was how–at its best–the church’s unity helps us see a glimmer of the wild love that characterizes the Godhead. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit work in similar ways in our lives–the Spirit reaches out to us before we even acknowledge God, taking us into his arms, introducing us to the person of the Son and passing us into his loving arms–arms through which we can see the shape, strength, and care of the Father’s own arms. The Spirit takes our feeble efforts to worship and pray and places us in the strong arms of the Son, as he takes our worship and offers it perfectly to the Father, placing us alongside the other gifts he carries in his arms and lays at his Father’s feet.

We are all, whether we realize it or not, being held in the arms of God–passed from the arms of person to person, invited to share in the life of love that characterizes God’s own life. And invited, through the power of the Spirit, to allow that love to characterize the way we do life with each other (what does that mean for the way we do church?), the way we work at forming a community of learning students in Seminary (what does it mean to have a “community” when people are physically separated from each other?), the way I hold the newborn daughter of the guy who sits next to us at church (what are my responsibilities to this child?). God’s love is both the beginning of our life with him and the impulse which drives our service to him–the arms that embrace us in love compel us to help others see, know, and live in that loving embrace.