We all love the thought of family.
• home, fireplace, welcome, rest—
• the freedom to be yourself, to plop
down in front of the TV or raid the fridge.
• It’s the place where we’re known,
where we’re not ashamed to bring our dirty clothes.
Yes, we love the
thought of being in relationships…But in reality, relationships are hard. And
although we love the thought of family (at least from the outside), the daily
grind of family is something entirely different.
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Here’s the reality:
- being in long-term relationships means that you’re going
to be sinned against, even by people who really do love you. And it’s not
going to happen just once!
- It also means that you’ll sin against people you
love…over and over again…Self-recrimination, guilt and despair hammer away
at your hope for that you’ll ever be the kind of family man or woman, the
kind of parent or child, you had hoped to be.
- Spouses will disappoint. Children fail to “make us
proud.”
Relationships are hard…No, they’re not just hard, they’re broken.
- Just how do we keep on loving when we are flawed and our
loved ones are flawed too?
- Where does the strength to forgive (again!) come from? And the strength to ask for forgiveness?
- What does it mean to live transparently, humbly and yet
hopefully before someone who knows you all too well, someone you have
hurt…someone who has hurt you?
Simply put, grace teaches us to love.
- The grace that has been
given to us in the gospel trains us to love sinners—nearby sinners,
sinners you sleep with, sinners who see you at your worst, sinners you see
at their worst.
- In the gospel we’re given a
grace that humbles our hearts and enables us to wash dirty feet, for the
gospel teaches us that our Saviour loved sinners and humbly washed their
feet when he was on his way to die for them.
- Nothing will transform our hearts and
turn us from demandingness and despair to gentleness and generosity like
the gospel.
None of us need more rules about how to be better family men
or women. You’ve already seen that list, haven’t you? We all know we’re to love one another.
The question
is not “Should we love?” the question is “how do we do that?” and the answer
always is, “Because Jesus has done it
for us.”
To be continued....
