Today is Mom's birthday. If she were here, we would be celebrating her 109th day of life. I can't believe that it has already been 20 years since she said goodbye to earthly living. I was much too young back then, at the age of 45, to lose my Mom. You always long for at least one more conversation to ask the questions you didn't get a chance to do. You often wished you would have had more talks, especially as you find yourself on a different side of life, other wise known as the senior years.
As parents we always desire to keep our family ties together and close, but it doesn't always work out that way. When our parents were still living, and as they grew more elderly, they of course were the bond that brought my brothers and myself together. As adult children, we each had a unique relationship to them, but I am realizing now, that we didn't necessarily have a tie with one another. We were children of the nuclear family, once you moved out, you established your own family, and you didn't live in the same geographical area of your siblings. Perhaps, because of the 5-10 year age span between us, you found that often you were not even in the same generation of thought, so there wasn't a particular pull to build relationship with one another. The only pull was the time we all went back to be with our folks, usually around special birthday celebrations.
Then the time comes, when parents are gone. You continue living primarily in your own circle of relationships. Your parents desired that you would build relationships with one another, but reality is differences seem to become major obstacles. You realize just how different you think and respond. It seems hard to hear one another, perhaps all the past hurts, regrets that you buried seem to have surfaced when you meet up again. One of you, is trying to fulfill our father's last wish to "keep the family together." Another one is feeling hurt and angry, feeling put upon with expectations that he doesn't want to deal with, and I feel my own hurt at times, feeling sensitive about how views on race, diversity, and politics are expressed. All put together, we withdraw and retreat from one another.
" The natural condition of life for human beings is one of reciprocal rootedness in others. As firmness of footing is a condition of walking and secure movement, so assurance of others being for us is the the condition of stable, healthy living. There are many ways this can be present in individual cases, but it must be there. If it is not, we are but walking wounded, our lives more or less a shambles until we die."
(Dallas Willard, Renovation of the Heart, p. 185)
Yes, we are walking wounded. Time coats us with hardened prickly skin, that defends us from any presumed assault. Unfortunately, we can end up demonizing one another as we try to figure out why we have arrived at this particular junction in life. But the reality is, you have to let go of what has happened in the past. As the Jesus Christ Show host often says, "you can't go forward in life by always looking back in the rear view mirror." That means listening to one another, forgiving and accepting one another even if they don't get a sense of what they did wrong, or at least what we thought they had done wrong. We all have limitations, we all have our own world view. We are broken people. As Dallas Willard reminds us, even a Christian home can be "a hell of cutting remarks, contempt, coldness and withdrawal or noninvolvement. " (Renovation of the Heart, p. 197)
King David is a complicated Biblical character. He often is epitomized as the "man after God's own heart." But reading through the books of 1st and 2nd Samuel, you get a picture of a complex soul. He was basically an ancient Eastern world warrior, one who killed brutally. In those days, battle was bloody and personal, spearing, stabbing, cutting off heads and the like. He had a lot of blood on his hands, not all of it justified. He was a poet, a musician, one who could calm King Saul in his insanity. He was passionate and rash at times, obviously a lover of many women, with his wives and concubines. He used his royal power to obtain and bed Bathsheba, murdered her husband with his own premeditated plot. He was a father of probably too many children, and didn't always do right by them. Yet he showed humility, kindness and generosity so many times, even grace and mercy. In spite of himself, he did own up to his sin and wrongdoing, showing genuine remorse and seeking God's forgiveness and mercy. He died with many things undone, his family left behind with all of their complicated relations to work out. And you wonder, he's the "one after God's own heart?"
None of us are perfect, we are all wounded and broken people. When will we truly acknowledge that, as well as knowing that even those who have left us, as our parents, grandparents and beyond were just as broken? It's easy to think in our own world of Christianese that we are so above the reality of being broken vessels. I know I am. I am one messed up, complicated person, not always the image that comes across with my smiling face. But I am going to try and move ahead in a positive way. Plans are made for a trip to my oldest brother's home this summer, and I will invite my other brother and family to at least take time to join us for a meal. I pray for restoration for all of us, but I will leave the outcome to God, He knows. . .
"Above all, keep fervent in your love for one another,
because love covers a multitude of sins."
(I Peter 4:8)
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