EXTEEEEENDED FAMILY
We Americans like to think of ourselves as a fiercely independent people. We celebrate our nation’s birth, its very existence, on Independence Day. That’s what my Father called it. However, my father didn’t just speak about independence, he lived by the idea that you take care of yourself and your own. In his words, he wasn’t a joiner. He didn’t belong to the Kiwanis or the Rotary club, instead, he worked and I guess I am the same way. I’m not much of a joiner. I have very few friends and I work hard to take care of myself and my own.
That’s why I was so taken by an acquaintance who recently told me that every weekday morning her sister, who is a single mom, drops off her young niece at 6:00 a.m. My friend babysits her niece, feeds her breakfast and then drives her to school before coming to work herself. Wow! I thought to myself, that is a commitment. That is really being family. Without Aunties help her sister couldn’t work and if her sister couldn’t work then that little girl wouldn’t have the basic necessities of life. As I talked more about this with my friend I learned that this is the way her family functions. My friend herself was partially raised by her grandmother, and her grandmother continues to raise generations of children.
Of course, there are reasons for this different way of being between my family and my friends family. There are socio-economic differences, there are cultural differences and there are racial differences too. But there is another difference also I live under the illusion that I can be independent and my friend does not. She knows from observation and experience that in this world that nobody purely makes it on their own. It takes a web of people supporting us and us supporting them for any of us to succeed. It takes a gaggle of voices cheering us on when we do well and chiding us when we are slacking off to keep us moving forward in life. We can live under the illusion of independence for just so long, but eventually life has a way of breaking us down to the point that we need, really NEED somebody else’s help or else we won’t survive.
Maybe this is why I am so drawn to the church because the church at its best is a family. Its a bigger family than my biological family. Its a more diverse family than my biological family. The church affords me to rub shoulders with people like my friend who have different experiences and different expectations than I do. I can hardly imagine asking someone to babysit my daughter at 6 am in the morning but now I know someone whom I could ask to do just that if I needed to because now I know that for my friend babysitting at 6 am is what being family is all about. And conversely, I probably have experience and skills which I could share with my friend which are outside the realm of her nuclear family. This is the benefit of the larger, more diverse, more inclusive family of the church. It is interesting to me that social scientists tell us that one of the greatest predictors of our future life is who we surround ourselves with today. So find yourself a church that is filled with people who are positive and encouraging. Find yourself a church with people in it who have accomplished some of the same things that you want to accomplish in life and don’t be shy about expressing your needs because the church is intended to be the family that God intends for us to have.