Everyone has weird relatives. If you doubt this, watch any group of unrelated people who will talk freely about how they spent Thanksgiving. You’re bound to hear a tale or five. If you think you don’t have weird relatives, check out the mirror, maybe you’re the one the others talk about when they get alone with friends.
(Disclaimer: If Mitch’s relatives or mine happen to read this, please be assured that I am, of course, speaking only about the other relatives.)
Truth is, you don’t get to pick your family. In our culture, you can select your spouse, and that’s about it. As individualistic and choice-driven as Americans love to be, you just can’t decide who gets to be your Aunt Wilma, or your in-laws (unless you had the foresight to cover this in your spousal interview), or that pierced persona threatening to run off with your daughter. For the most part, you don’t get to pick the people you’re going to hug and condole and congratulate at weddings, funerals, graduations and holidays for the rest of your life. Sometimes I think it’s one of God’s little practical jokes, a gift to enliven us with the unexpected and the uncontrollable, to help us take ourselves a little less seriously. Some people take this reality in stride, while others react by moving far, far away.
(Disclaimer: Mitch & I live in Colorado because we love mountains, not because Colorado is about as distant as you can get from both Georgia and California simultaneously. Besides, the craziest one of all lives just down the road.)
However much you might complain about your kin’s embarrassing eccentricities, you love them because blood makes you family. And you also, if you’re a nice person, accept the ones they chose because marriage and adoption also make you family. That doesn’t mean you approve of them, agree with them, want to spend time with them, or even like them – it just means you’re RELATED and they have certain claims on you in a way no one else does.
Of course, in the best of cases, you do like them and enjoy them and want to be with them whenever you can. I love my family: the straight-laced and the tattooed, graduates of seminary or rehab, veterans and young soldiers, politicians and truck drivers, veterinarians and novelists, home schoolers and public school teachers. I’ve got one relative whose company engineered the sound on movies you’ve watched, and another who cooks on a wood stove by choice and displays more guns than most preachers own Bibles.
Wacky, wild or wonderful, I get warm fuzzy feelings when I think of them all!
It’s the same with my bigger family, my two billion brothers and sisters around the world who have individually decided that faith in Jesus Christ is a once in eternity proposition too sweet to pass up. You know, some of these people are really, truly weird. Some of them have annoying habits. Some of them are just plain messed up and should be in rehab. Some just got out of rehab and live with more zeal than prudence.
But you’re my relatives, and I love you all. If you believe Jesus is God, and that he died on the cross to take the heat for every wrong choice you’ve ever made – you’re my family. (And if not, you’re my neighbor.)
Now, that doesn’t mean I agree with everything you have to say, and you might get on my nerves with some of your quirks, oddities, or what I might consider to be unbiblical theology. And no doubt you could return the same sentiment about me. But you’re family, made so by the power of His blood, by our marriage to His son. We are siblings, both by birth and adoption.
A family is not formed by affection alone, however much we might wish to belong. It takes birth, marriage, or adoption. The family of God is formed by all three
And just like my natural relatives, I didn’t get to choose who belongs. I just accept and love the ones God chose to be my family. Every time I go to church (particularly on those occasions when I get to visit a church different than my preferred style), I get this excited feeling inside, because I love the Bride of Christ in all her wild, crazy, wonderful variety and sometimes weirdness.
Love is not the same as unilateral, uniform, unquestioning insipid tolerance. Love celebrates differences, but love also questions inconsistencies, confronts incongruities, gently exposes weaknesses and failings in a spirit of restoration and mutual growth. Love is iron sharpening iron, neither yielding, sparks flying, yet understanding that in the end, we are of the same element.
And that element is blood.
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4 comments:
Thanks for a heart-warming post! As I read it, my wacky, ditzy, fun, and sometimes tempermental mother-in-law came to mind. My hubby and I recently visited her for Thanksgiving, and she picked a fight with us in a crowded movie theatre. She had offered to buy us each a soft drink but returned with one drink too many. She had ordered the jumbo size so the drinks looked more like buckets, and she had to have a counter person carry them back to our seats. When my husband pointed out that we had only ordered two medium drinks, she went ballistic (in her defense, Alex probably shouldn't have asked if she had gone crazy, especially since she's been sensitive about her recent bouts of forgetfulness). We made up by the time the movie started, and thankfully the usher didn't have to escort us out.
In a related story, my sister-in-law recently commented that she wanted to buy a Thomas Kincade painting of Jesus as the Good Shepherd. "It's very expensive," she said, "and it's even more money if I buy one that's signed." In all seriousness, my mother-in-law asked, "You mean Jesus signed it???"
As someone who married into an extremely weird family, I must say that life would be a lot duller without my weird in-laws (and I'm sure they think I'm just as weird!)
With family like that, why spend money on movie tickets for entertainment? :-)
In my family and my in-laws, there are degenerates and preachers, lunatics and liars, thieves and the righteous. We have the once-married, the thrice married, the highly educated and the barely educated. Holidays have become so awkward that a few years ago I promised my kids that I would not force the extended family on them any more. The dream I always had of an extended family that wanted to be together is lying shattered, swept up with the detrius of daily living.
What is left is the family of my heart. It is the family I have collected on my own--the friends, the parents of friends whom I have adopted as my own, the family I have found in Christ. These are the people I go to when I need to cry or rail at the trials of my life.
Beth, you have become part of my family, though we don't spend holidays together :-( You are one I know I can tell the truth. I don't have to mince words or pretend, and that's better than most families I know.
Wow. I just read this post again in light of recent events it strikes me once again. We DON"T get to choose our family.
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