union y familia
tomorrow will begin the second week of my marriage and family course. it has proven to be much more difficult than i anticipated.
when you discuss marriage problems and child-development issues it's impossible not to recognize some of those patterns within your own life and family. i have had a really hard time thinking about some of these subjects/issues and realizing that the "Y" family is not immune. that is not to say that i am naive enough to believe that my family is functional on any level, but that i am surprised and saddened by just how ugly it seems.
i have begun noticing certain aspects of my parents' relationships with their parents and siblings and can see how that translates to me and my sibling. it's scary. your immediate response is, "i will stop this/these trends with my family and children (fist banging on desk/table)." but the truth is that you haven't even scratched the surface. your parents fucked you up because their parents fucked them up, and so on. in fact your family's influence runs so deep that in trying to avoid doing what they did wrong, you come up with a completely new standard of wrong (and probably are even repeating wrongs of past and ancient generations of your family, but just doing it in a modern context). dammit. sigh.
so, what then you ask? i don't know. i guess most people just try to do their level best and hope that they don't raise a serial killer, but i think that naming what's there is the first step to righting the wrongs of the past. if we know why we are the way that we are then we can begin to analyze the way that we act. this sounds easy, but you must understand that i am basically suggesting you deconstruct every comment, facial expression, internal reaction, etc. that you have when you interact with another person--especially your spouse/kids/girlfriend. it's that serious. but if we at least begin to admit certain things to ourselves then we can at least begin to recognize when we start acting (or even reacting) in a certain way. it's depressing to even thing about it.
understand that i am not suggesting 'escaping' the past, but naming and recognizing it and the effect that it has had on your life. after all, you are who you are because your parents fucked up. now you get to start exploring how fucked up you are and your kids will be. yay!
i know, i know. this sounds dire. the truth is that most of us are (at least on the surface) well-adjusted. but we are sinful, malfunctioning beings.
think of how free we will be when He returns to reconcile the wrongs.
abrupt ending. deal with it.
2 comments:
While I agree that we will be amazingly free when Christ comes again to reconcile all wrongs; however, let's not overlook the triumph that we live in right now.
Sure, we live in sin and have "adopted" that from our fathers and their fathers, etc. And we will pass that down through our guilt in The Fall.
However, we have been given grace which frees us to give grace to others (certainly our family should be primary recipients!).
Do we believe in God's great goodness? Do we believe that He will bring glory to himself through all of creation? Therefore, even our sin will be redeemed! There will be glory in the reality that all things will be revealed and we will still be accepted. The scandal is that we taste that even now...even in a sinful state.
How do we free our children from scars we will pass down? We give them the gospel so they can forgive us. We give them a freedom that has freed us.
I don't want to minimize the value of analyzing sinful patterns in order to encourage God-ward behavior, but if it does not drive us to forgiveness and grace, it's not of God.
some very interesting remarks.
i could spend a lot of time and effort responding to some of the things said here, but i will not.
i will say that yes we are recipients of, and capable of showing grace to others. our sin will be redeemed and that is unbelievable at times, but we are still in a sinful state.
looking at family systems/patterns may or may not drive one to forgiveness and grace, but that does not mean that it's not of God. you said it yourself, "He will bring glory to himself through all of creation". by naming and analyzing what our family system has taught us to be we are able to free the individual to better know grace through their pain and to begin the forgiving process, if forgiveness is appropriate.
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