Any man who can drive safely while kissing a pretty girl is simply not giving the kiss the attention it deserves. — Albert Einstein

If a picture is worth a thousand words, I’d say a kiss is worth at least ten thousand. But even then, can words do it justice? In his book Your God is Too Safe, Mark Buchanan attempts an objective description of the kiss:

“Two people press their moist, creased, facial orifices together; cinch tight the sphincter muscles that draw the flesh around the orifice together into a bulbous mound, and exchange saliva and breath.”

Hmmm. That doesn’t describe the smooches I exchange with my wife. The fact is, sometimes you have to experience something to understand it. This is true with kisses… and it’s also true with the family of God.

An important element of our identity in Christ is our integration into the family of God, as Paul assumes in Colossians 1:1-2:

Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God, and Timothy our brother, To God’s holy people in Colossae, the faithful brothers and sisters in Christ: Grace and peace to you from God our Father.

“Brothers and sisters” is translated from the Greek word adelphos (which literally means “a male sibling with at least one parent in common”). In context, it clearly means “God’s holy people”—those of us who have become brothers and sisters in Christ, and as they say, “You can pick your friends, but you can’t pick your family.” Whether intimate or estranged, unified or conflicted, we are brothers and sisters in Christ, siblings in the family of God.