The Trouble With a Large Family

Long ago, in van far, far way (well, actually, it was just 3 miles from home), we were making a brief trip across town.  As is the case in many trips of any length in our van, two siblings began to have difficulties with each other.

Looks are deceiving.

It was very predictable.  One child was doing something that irritated the other.  This other child asked “Would you please stop it?!”, the prescribed advice we had given. While the delivery of the request was technically correct, the attitude left much to be desired.  The demand was repeated for the third time, in the exact same words, with the exact same attitude.  At that moment, through the rear view mirror, I saw her brother smack her.

I immediately stopped the van and got out.  For the first nanosecond I intended to go to the back of the van and deal with the issue.  Instead, I said out loud “I can’t ride with these children.  I’ll walk the rest of the way”.

Good parenting skills?  Probably not.  But I felt much better being out of the van.  My wife, who was also questioning my parenting skills, drove a hundred yards, pulled off to the side of the road, and waited for me to catch up.  I drove the rest of the way to our destination.  There was dead silence.

It was our decision that our family should be large.  It was a good decision.  But while our children have few problems when alone and there is never any arguing with one child in the van, as a group they often end up squabbling.   But we knew that this process of living together would cause our children to grow, prepare them for the world ahead, and we would enjoy them all the while.

This trouble with getting along carries over even into the church.  Adult children of God are more refined than kids though.  There is no hitting.  They sing “They will know we are Christians by our love” (at least the older ones did), and they try their best to love each other.

Folks are drawn to a body of local believers which they believe share their own personal doctrines.  Then trouble comes when they interact in tight quarters like the back of a van, such as a Bible Study or some other meeting.  It is there that we learn how differently we really think.

Sometimes we may wonder if there is another group that is more like us.

Most of us come to realize that we are more than a gathering of like minded believers (which for the most part is only partially true).  We come to understand that we are family.  We are blood, and because as difficult as it may be sometimes, we know that being together is one of God’s ways to refine us, and we willingly submit ourselves to that.

We also come to understand that our church family is not just our local gathering.  It is the whole body of believers in Christ.  We just happen to see parts of the family more than others.

This is not to say that as the refining goes on, we all begin to think the same like one big perfect family.  To the contrary, those differences often do not go away.  But hopefully we do come to love and appreciate each other in spite of them.  We will not all come to think alike any more than our 10 year old son and his 12 year old sister will, which, in all honesty, wouldn’t even be natural.

Meanwhile, we have a Father much wiser than I driving the van.


Note:  This story first appeared in the June 2010 edition of the Manna. http://readthemanna.org.