“Who is my mother and my sisters and my brothers?  These are.”  Jesus

“The family that prays together stays together.” Anonymous

“The other night I ate at a real nice family restaurant.  Every table had an argument going.”  George Carlin

My sister Mary Jo is visiting from Wisconsin.  It’s wonderful to have her.  She has a heart as big as she is.   I’m guessing her love language is gift-giving.  She is an expert quilter and has given away quilts to family and friends for all sorts of reasons, and for no reason at all. 

We haven’t always gotten along well.  The same holds true for my other three sisters, all older than me.  In fact, I’m somewhat estranged from two of them due to the circumstances of my mother’s Alzheimer’s.  That’s a topic for another blog. Or perhaps, as mom used to say, some things are better left unsaid.  The point is that family is a challenging landscape to navigate, and can be quite bittersweet.

When I looked up quotes for this blog many of them idealized the biological family.  In my experience I’ve found a loving, caring, praying family like the one concisely captured in the second quote above is the exception, rather than the rule.  My oldest daughter (speaking of family) was recently talking about this.  She made the very perceptive statement that traumas that people experience when they’re young in their families of origin have profound, permanent, and often-times very negative affects on the rest of their lives.  I found that to be true in my personal, pastoral, and professional experience.  In my time working with people who struggle with debilitating addictions, I’ve come to realize that many of their addictive behaviors are driven by the sub-conscious, deeply buried hurts they’d experienced as children at the hands of their own family members.

So what do we do with this topic of family and both the pleasure and the pain that one experiences?  Well, we can be thankful if we were born into a relatively health family and raised in an atmosphere of love.  What a gift!  But if, on the other hand, we were born into a dysfunctional or even abusive family, we face the difficult prospect of discovering a way to deal with it. 

It’s easy to say, “We need to forgive”.  Sometimes that works.  Many times it doesn’t.  We might be reticent to forgive, and rightfully so, for a number of reasons.  One is that we misunderstand the meaning of forgiveness.  We might think that forgiveness means giving the offender a pass, or justifying their behavior, or condoning that which caused the hurt and harm. That’s not the intent of forgiveness.  Forgiveness is not so much setting the other free, but freeing ourselves from that past pain which we have carried with us into our present lives.  It is possible to forgive, and at the same time to establish healthy boundaries.

That was the case with a college-aged woman whom I met very early in my ministry.  She had been sexually abused by her father and was struggling with the thought that as a follower of Jesus she was obligated to forgive him.  She thought that meant she would have to allow him back not only into her life, but the life of her children when she had them.  It took some time for her to embrace the truth that forgiving him was what she needed for her own healing, but that by no means did it necessitate allowing him back into her life.  In fact, that would be a very harmful thing to do.

Sometimes as we mature and live our own lives, we realize that though we may always love our sisters, brothers, or even parents, we no longer share the same values, beliefs, or outlook on life.  Therefore, while being civil, kind, and courteous (I’m thinking of sending Christmas and birthday cards, calling or emailing them occasionally), we really no longer share a common bond other than our genetics.

When that happens, we might look for family in other places.  Not to idealize Jesus, but that seems to be what he did.  Yes, he always retained a bond with His mother, but if he had siblings (there is theological debate about this), they don’t appear in His ministry narrative.  His family extended far beyond mere blood lines.

I paused here while writing this, thinking about who might fit into that category for me.  The first person to come to mind is my dear friend Ernie Koenig whom I met in 1988 in Chicago.  He became like an older brother to me and has remained so.  We still speak on the phone at least once a week.  There’s also Linda whom I met in Rocky Ford in 2015.  She’s like an older sister.  We share a common bond and communicate quite frequently.  I remember after my dad died, I thought my father-in-law might fit the bill.  In fact, I made a request of him to do so.  Never happened.  Such is life.  Such is life in families, no matter what form they take. Chris is another non-biological family member.  He’s like a brother to me.  Though he lives in Hawaii, we speak frequently. The list could go on, but I’ve already exceeded my word count.  So, dear reader, I will leave you with these questions.

What is your relationship with your family?

What kind of experience did you have growing up in your family? How has it shaped you?

Do you have people in your life that are more like family than friends?