Genesis 3-4.16: It was complicated with the original Adam’s Family.

Luke 2.41-52: Jesus’ parents have trouble understanding their 12-year-old.

On Jimmy Kimmel, maybe Fallon, last week, through my encouched semi-consciousness, I heard some parents talking about recent weeks at home 24/7 with their children. They laughed how they loved their kids but had new appreciation for their teachers who had them seven hours a day.

Not always laughable: We are learning of tough pressures on people encased at home with little physical-emotional space from one another. On the other hand, there are those who live alone, even more than ever. Experts note that along with all else, there is likely a mental health price to pay as we navigate the Pandemic Sea.

Our recent hyper-at-home-ness has me brooding about the multi-faceted phenomenon we call families...associated agony and ecstasy swirled therein.

Somewhere hiding on my shelves is Tolstoy’s world classic ANNA KARENINA, which I have tried to start a couple times. You may recognize its famous first sentence: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Not sure it’s true, but it is a classic-y quip.

As a pastor I have had the blessing and challenge of doing life with numerous families for numerous years. As a person, I have done even more ‘numerous’ years with my beloved, interesting family, found now from here to eternity.

Below, there are some zigzag observations that have shown up in my sermons and writings, minus stories and illustrations that attended them...

+ The line between happy and unhappy, normal and abnormal, functional and dysfunctional families - if it exists at all – is a meandering, dotted one.

+ People we love the most are the ones that usually drive us the craziest.

+ Much of the best and worst that happens to us...happens in our families.

+ Other people’s families look more normal, less problematic than ours – especially when we are going through tough times. Similarly...

+ When our families have hard stuff acutely or chronically, it has a way making us feel weirder than we actually are. (God created plenty of weird to go around.)

+ The older we get, many become both more aware of our parents’ imperfections and more appreciative they did as well as they did getting their love to/through us. (I know this is not true for all.)

+ I have lost track of how many times I refer to then Vanderbilt Divinity School Pastoral Care Professor Peggy Way’s quip that ‘love is basically putting up with each other’. I have added...when we don’t much feel like it or deserve it, aka ‘un-put-up-with-able.’

+ Forgiveness in families and otherwise seldom means forgetting. It’s more going on somehow with what we may never forget. A bit of a miracle...

+ But wait: Forgiveness is hardly ever just going back to the way it was. It is finding a new normal, sometimes together, sometimes apart.

+ Real life love is dappled with grief and grace: loving people as they are when they fall short of how we would like them to be. And they...us!

+ People seldom show love in the exact way with the exact timing we would like. Deal with it. What’s amazing, even grace, is with our imperfections galore, we are able to love and be loved at all.

+ The Bible calls it lament...lamentation. It is not whining or being a martyr. More like soul sigh or cry. There are some life/family situations that just don’t resolve easily or at all. Some need extra loads of care, which requires others to give extra loads of care. Fair?Don't waste time trying to figure that. Thanks for those quiet saints who sigh and care on.

+ I have been blessed with several great counselors over the years to whom to refer many beloved church people and on occasion myself. ‘Strong’ people need, as much as anyone, coaching in coping and self-care.

+ Don’t get me started on this ‘getting back to the Biblical family’ thing. From the First Family ‘East of Eden’ saga to the Holy Family having a hard time understanding their 12-year-old, and the wild array of families (Eg. David) in between, Biblical families had plenty of crazy up and downs. God must love dysfunctional families because he seems to have made a lot of them, Biblical and otherwise.

+ Humor and seriousness are not adversaries but allies. In that vein most all of us are products of loving dysfunctional families. I heard about a normal family once, but they moved without leaving a forwarding address.

God, we lift up our families with their blessings and hurts. We lift up to you our homes and those without homes. We lift up to you those staying home to help and those who are leaving their homes at risk to help. We lift up to you the Heinz 57 ways in which families come...families joined by birth, and those whose hearts find each other. Amen.