Entering the New Year with Thoughts on Family Life

I have finished reading L'Abri by Edith Schaeffer. The thing I appreciate most is the "realness" of their family. The Schaeffer's have quite a legacy in the way of family and I think Edith is someone whose advice and thoughts should be highly valued.

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Yesterday I began reading her book What Is a Family? My pen was busy underlining away in the very first chapter. I am really excited about this book and feel it's timely purpose in my life. She begins by describing events at a family reunion. After many beautiful scenes of special moments depicting much love and care, she comes to this:

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"Conversation grows hot with differing opinions at times, and even more heated with strong agreement at others. People pound their fists and walk out of the room, come back and start again, and either modify a point, or 'suddenly see' something they didn't see before-or go to bed disturbed or mad, to get it sorted out in the next discussion or perhaps alone with someone. This is not polite surface conversation, but an exchange of growing, developing ideas which are often a result of much reading, thinking, praying and struggle...Each one has something to say in the direction of the unmistakable worthwhileness of fighting to have the continuity which cannot be had outside of family-a family which is not shattered, scattered, fragmented, splintered, but together in a growing unity throughout the years and generations." (emphasis mine)

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My family has recently lived with pressure that something was very wrong with us if we did not live in a continuous state of peace and harmony. This idea threatened to destroy us. I have always contended that times like those described above indicate a closeness that can not be had in an environment where "if you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all." Some people tend to prize peace at too great a cost, and the cost in relationships is shallowness substituted for closeness. Patrick Henry addressed the idea of prizing peace above all in the political realm and I believe it is just as important in a family realm.

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I am not saying it is not vital to strive for the fruits of the Spirit in our conversations and relationships with our family and others. There is some behavior that is never acceptable. But we must allow each other room to FEEL and EXPRESS emotion. Then we must be willing to stick it out and work through anything that will threaten the relationships we value so much.

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"The family reunion did not come about because of perfect people, nor because of having had perfect relationships every moment of every day, not because of having always made right decisions, nor because of calm perfect dispositions and easy-to-live-with characters. There have been a long sucession of mistakes and sins, forgiveness asked for and given, troubles and feelings of hopelessness, discouragement to the point of wanting to give up, hard lessons learned, and a fresh learning from each other."

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"Frustration, anger, impatience, the feeling of being misunderstood, the giving in to day-dreams of perfection-these or other forms of dissatisfaction invade every human relationship for at least minutes, if not hours or days. Have any two people never felt like walking away from each other? The difference is that the deep underlying sense of the importance of family continuity must be stronger than the insistence on having perfection. People throw away what they could have, by insisting on perfection which they cannot have, and looking for it where they will never find it. Everyone has been in danger of this, but many more each year are giving in to it.

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The first chapter is titled 'A Changing Life Mobile'. In it she compares family to a mobile, a living art form.

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"There is a beauty and continuity which can never be had unless someone in the family has the certainty that the whole art form is more important than one incident, or even a string of incidents."

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And this final quote is the last paragraph of the first chapter.

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"People need to experience the beauty of being part of a mobile art form, and people who have never known such beauty exists need to see it taking place. If human relationships are to be beautiful on a wider form, in church and state, the individual families making up society have to be really worked on by someone who understands that artists have to work to produce their art. It doesn't just fall down readymade from the sky!"

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The gallery where our art is displayed is the church and the world, both in desparate need of seeing the beauty of family. So let us enter this new year with the mindset to work at our art.

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"And let us not lose heart in doing good, for in due time we shall reap if we do not grow weary." Galatians 6:9

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Happy New Year to everyone!