FAMILIES

Thought For The Day

“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

- Leo Tolstoy (Anna Karenina)

I can usually tell if I’m going to enjoy a book by reading the first sentence.  My favorite opening sentence in all of literature has to be the opening of Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities.  The opening of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina is a close second. As you can probably imagine from the first sentence, Anna Karenina is a novel about an unhappy family, described in an excruciating detail only found in works by 19th century Russian authors.

One of the things that bothers me about groups like Focus on the Family (ok, there’s more than one 😂) is their insistence that we all adhere to their idealized notion of the Perfect Christian Family. The PCF, in their view, seems to involve a dad who works outside the home, a mom who stays home, and kids, preferably a boy and a girl, who excel in school and love Sunday school. No single moms, remarried dads, or, heaven forbid, gay people, need apply.  In other words, the Perfect Christian Family is reminiscent of those post-WW2 nuclear families beamed into our homes in the 50s and 60s, like Leave it to Beaver, etc. And if our families don’t measure up to this ideal we are somehow a failure in God’s eye.

Of course, even a casual reading of the Bible shows us that biblical families are far from this ideal. In fact, biblical families are a mess.  One need look no further than the foundational family in the Old Testament, that of Abraham, to see how dysfunctional biblical families really are. And yet even in their disfunction, God was able to work through these families to accomplish great things. In the case of Abraham, God founded a lineage that spawned the three great monotheistic religions that now claim over three billion adherents in every corner of the world.

I believe God revels in the full spectrum of familial relationships found in the human community. And if God can accomplish amazing things through families like Abraham’s, just imagine what he can do through yours.