FAMILY
I am writing this particular post in early Jan, shortly after Christmas 2022.
I mention that because Christmas is, for all kinds of understandable reasons, the time of the year when families most tend to gather. Some gather out of choice but many, I believe, gather out of a sense of obligation - it is just what you are supposed to do. For a few guys I’ve spoken to on this subject, it’s also a bit of a nightmare - because family to them is not necessarily a good place. In fact, it’s a pretty toxic place and going near it always leaves them feeling worse, not better.
Now that I’m in my late 50s, I see families as the arena of some of the most difficult, stifling relationships that people have in their lives. Some of the parent-child relationships and dynamics within them are distorted beyond recognition - but because we get so used to them it is very difficult for us to live them in a healthy adult way. So we often live them in a regressed way, feeling strangely disempowered and dishonoured but we daren’t walk away.
I have experienced something of that in my past - the sense of obligation, the toxicity, the disempowerment and the lack of freedom to choose to exit a scenario that felt diminishing. But I’m not in that position any more thankfully, and this is why…
As I’ve mentioned in a few different places on this website - when I was 35, I experienced a major life crisis – a good crisis. I often tell people that it was like having a ‘good car crash’. I use that analogy because it felt so dramatic and turned out to be so life-changing. In essence, I ‘found faith’ in Jesus Christ or ‘He found faith in me’ is a bit more how the reality felt.
As I went through the experience, I began to join in with church culture and to read the Bible, as an intelligent adult, not as I had done previously as a child. It became clear that one of the many remarkable things that had happened to me was that I had somehow joined an entirely new family - not a blood family ‘born of descent’ but a spiritual family.
If, like me, you have found talk like this a bit nonsensical, I understand your desire to quit reading here, as I would have done in the past. But I invite you to restrain your sense of aggravation and read on… especially if the word ‘toxic’ above chimed with you.
So if you become a Christian, good’n’proper, then in essence, regardless of who your dad was, your father now becomes God himself. Jesus Christ becomes your big brother, and everybody else who believes in Christ, whether they go to church or not automatically becomes your brother and sister. If you’d said that to me before, I’d have just laughed at you. But I don’t laugh now because it has happened to me and has been a very real and hugely liberating experience.
Soon after my conversion experience in 2000, I travelled to Africa and went to a mud church in the middle of nowhere in Mozambique. What I soon realised, was that these people around me, singing in Swahili or whatever the local language was, felt very close to me – I actually felt like part of their family.
So if your experience of a family is as confused, and at times distorted as mine felt, what about considering the possibility of joining what might just be the greatest family on Earth? I’m not trying to convert you, I’m just sharing something that I have discovered. This family is not devoid of its problems because we are all human but it did feel like a completely fresh start. Now I call the lady that I used to struggle to call ‘mum’, ‘Anne’ instead and it is allowing me to have a more adult and whole relationship. And the genuine love that felt lacking has, thankfully, had a chance to return.
