Even if you haven’t heard of them before, you know what is being described the first time you hear the phrase: trust fund babies.  These are folks born to significant wealth, who don’t have to sweat about making it in the world. 

If you’re a trust fund baby, you don’t need to cry about not making it into your top choice for college, and when you get to college you don’t need to sweat your grades.  You certainly don’t have to worry about being hired because work is strictly an optional activity.

Not surprisingly, trust fund babies are often the object of scorn from the rest of us who have worked hard to get as far as we have and who experience the very real anxiety that a layoff, an accident, or an illness could cause our financial house of cards to tumble. 

It’s not that trust fund babies couldn’t get sick or be hit by a bus, it’s that their financial security is such that these hardships could not threaten their ability to keep their homes or to pay tuition for their children.  The rest of us live with a precarity that trust fund babies can observe but do not experience.

As Christians, we are trust fund babies of a sort.  We have an inheritance.  We are joint heirs with Christ.  We’ve been adopted as daughters and sons of God.  We have a place in the family of God that no one can take from us.

But we are really weird trust fund babies.  Instead of enjoying the status and riches we’ve been given, a lot of us are anxious about our place in the family.  We worry that we haven’t done enough, that we haven’t worked hard enough, that we aren’t good enough.

To all this God says, “All that I have is yours.  Enjoy it.  All that I want is you.”

Sharing an inheritance with Jesus doesn’t mean that we won’t have our share of troubles and trials.  What it means is that nothing can separate us from the love of God that has made us part of the family.

The only way to lose this inheritance and your place in the family is to walk away and close the door yourself.  And even this doesn’t mean you can’t come back home.

We have been born into unspeakable riches.  So don’t live like a pauper. 

Prayer:  I can’t imagine why you’d want to adopt me, but I’m happy to be in the family.