Day 23 - family

Families are odd things arent they?   I find myself being a daughter and a sister in one family and a mother and a wife in another one , trying to negotiate my way through all sorts of permutations of those relationships without upsetting too many people or experiencing too much grief !  My family is a particularly complicated one given that my parents divorced when I was about 5 yrs old, both remarried, both then lost their spouses and married again.  So Ive had four step-parents and the step parents have got five children and eight grandchildren between them all of whom are sort of related to me through marriage - but not really.   Both my parents are now in their late seventies/early eighties and are starting to need a bit more care and attention than they have in the past.  My brother is in London and Im in Northern Ireland so trying to work out how we might be able to offer support and care to our parents as they get older is logistically quite a challenge.    I suppose in many ways my family is now pretty typical - its a divorced-remarried-step relationship-physically distanced set up ; bearing little or no relationship to the nuclear family with 2.4 kids of years gone by.

I wonder how ready the church is to respond to the huge shift there has been in society since divorce became so common and step-parenting and grandparenting became the norm rather than the exception. Family breakdown is now so common but that doesn't mean its consequences are any less devastating.  What it does mean is that many families are now living under the shadow of the failure of a previous relationship ( or sometimes the failure of two relationships)  and the pressure of trying to step-parent blended families where children from two previous marriages might now be expected to relate as siblings together.  There are issues for children of contact with the other parent - or with shared care between two households.   I get the feeling that the church doesnt yet really have a frame of reference for caring for and ministering to the complex thing that family has become.

We need to get up to speed because there is going to be an influx of people into the churches - people with broken and difficult backgrounds and complicated families.  People who need acceptance and love and understanding as they work through their past hurts with Jesus and experience His healing and freedom. We need to offer peace and mercy not judgement to those with chaotic pasts - especially to the children who have a skewed understanding of fatherhood and mothers and relationships and covenant and promises.