The latest in the news is people going back to their roots.  Literally going back to the countries of old!

Phil and Sandy Ferretti are the latest examples.  

They would visit Italy as often as they could, and truly wanted to stay, but felt it was too much trouble to get dual citizenship until they found the blood law, which is written in old Italian laws.  Ferretti found that unlike U.S. citizenship, which is based on where you were born; in Italy, it’s based on whether your parents had Italian blood in their veins.  

I’m not sure if this will cause a spike in buying the DNA test kits, but it certainly is interesting.  

This thought took me to the scripture of our citizenship in heaven.  

Philippians 3:20 states “But our citizenship is in heaven, and from it we await a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ.”  

All this thought process made me want to find out who I came from, and not just a few hundred years back.  

I wanted to know from Bible times, who my ancestors are.  Was I a Levi? Is that why I love to serve?

Serving is one of my love languages.  Was I part of the tribe of Asher, Benjamin, Dan?  Not likely, since I’m not Jewish.

I know I have European roots since my main surnames are George and Manning, so I did some digging.  Shem, Noah’s son, had a great-grandson named Eber. Eber and his cousins lived in the time of Babel and refused to take part in the Tower of Babel, so the Shemites, as well as the Japhethites, never had their language confused.  

We can trace people by their language, at least the Semitic and Indo-European languages.  

Japheth, to this day is believed to be the father of Europeans, who is the brother of Shem.  Out of the seven sons of Japheth’s, whose language was not confused, emerges a single family beginning with Japheth, multiplied in the course of time and populated the northern shore of the Mediterranean, the whole of Europe, the British Isles and Scandinavia, as well as the larger part of Russia.  

I was so excited to find out that I might have descended from the Shemits, or Japhethtis, who were Gentiles.  

No guarantees, but I wanted to find out more about the Japhethtis.  

It turns out this is the same Japheth that Noah said that God would enlarge. (Genesis 9:27).  

This enlargement has been continuing and occurring in every part of the world, with the exception of the Far East.  

Once again, no guarantees this is my lineage, but it does give one a sense of belonging and pride.  

Those feelings made me wonder why I do not feel that way about heaven?  Oh sure, I want to go to heaven. I should feel pride that I am God’s child and that sense of belonging, but I don’t think I have ever thought of it that way.  

I do feel pride that I am God’s child, but I have never thought of it as my actual family, a family I descended from.  

But wait, I did not descend from God’s family, I was grafted in, adopted.  Maybe this is why I don’t have those feelings. You can’t feel the same pride when you are adopted in, only gratefulness and gratitude, which is what I feel.  

Exploring this has made me think about these things, and I will continue to ponder.  

I do know it says in 2 Corinthians 5:1 “For we know that if the tent that is our earthly home is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens.”  Now that is something to long for!

 

Karen Y. Stevens is the founder of Orange County Christian Writers Guild