By Amy Butler
Like many of you, I had the opportunity to spend significant time with my family this holiday season. By “family,” I mean not my immediate family with whom I live everyday, but those whom I only get to see occasionally.
You know that family, right? The out-of-town family, the ones with whom I grew up and from whom I grew away as adulthood drove a wedge between our lives. We’re not the same as we were so many years ago. How could we be? Our life journeys have taken us to such different places.
We are almost always on different sides of the fence politically.
We worship in churches that represent radically different theological perspectives.
We raise our children with very different philosophies.
And these differences are often just the beginning.
I was reading about such a family just the other day, while visiting my sister and her family in Colorado for a few days. After dinner we pulled out the children’s Bible in 365 easy-to-read stories and read about Joseph, framing his brothers with a hidden silver cup, accusing them of theft, just to test their character. Ensuing discussion around the dinner table reminded us all that this was just the latest in a string of crazy interactions these family members had had with each other. Remember? Jacob had favorites, Joseph was arrogant, the brothers violently disposed of him — layers and layers of pain and mistakes and misunderstandings and, yes, pure dysfunction.
An Joseph and his family aren’t the only ones; there are a lot of dysfunctional families in the Bible. Come to think of it, I don’t know of any family without some history of pain, misunderstanding, and mistakes. It’s times like these, though — holidays that bring us together from far-flung places and different lives — that remind me, again, of the many gifts that can come with family, dysfunction and all.
I always remember this time of year, for example, that there are no people on this whole, wide planet who know us better than our families. None. They are maddening sometimes, that’s for sure. But with them there is a comfort level that cannot be manufactured, one that comes with years and years of shared experience and cannot be easily recreated with new acquaintances. And, while holidays are great opportunities to celebrate the many current blessings of our lives, they may be even better opportunities to remember the gifts that often are obscured in the crazy dysfunction of all our family systems.
After all, these people know us with a depth not shared by many. They know about that truly unfortunate outfit I wore to the 9th grade dance, my first. And they know the reason I never serve peas is because my grandfather hates them and my mother never, ever served them when we were growing up. Not once. And they are the ones that know you never open gifts on Christmas Eve — you have to wait until after Dad cooks breakfast Christmas morning. Who else just knows those things?
Like the tearful reunion that brought Joseph and his brothers back together despite all their years of pain, there are times when we can find moments of grace to remember threads of shared experience that bind us together and, sometimes, even build strong and far-reaching bridges that span the differences of all the years and decisions and philosophies that now seem to divide us.
For moments of grace like this these holidays, I am giving thanks. And I’m hanging on to the hope of moments of grace, healing and reconciliation still ahead. After all, as my father reminded us around the dinner table the other night, “Yes, there’s a lot of dysfunction. But at least it’s our dysfunction.” Pain and promise, all mixed together, but — most importantly — shared.
Thanks be to God.