Family: A World That Lives In Us . . .

You can kiss your family and friends good-bye and put miles between you, but at the same time you carry them with you in your heart, your mind, your stomach, because you do not just live in a world but a world lives in you.

~Frederick Buechner, in
Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale

My grandmother died in April, 1988. We don't know if she was eighty-six or eighty-eight years old. Grandma wasn't sure herself when she was born . . . . The story is that a very callous stepmother never told a pretty little girl when her birthday was. We never knew either whether her birth-name was Sadie or Sarah or Pearl. But she was my Grandma -- She had a family and no death leaves those left behind unaffected.

Individual and very specific memories of my Grandma Sadie return to me sometimes with a force they could not have had while she was yet living. And at the same time the threads of her life are woven so closely into my own life that I don't know her as a separate person, but a piece of myself that makes my own life and passions come more clearly into focus. We are family.

Do you see how this precious woman is cradling the dog like a child!!?? Oh my goodness! The animal-lover in me is thinking, "No Wonder! Clearly this is a genetic thing!"

Surely my husband will understand now.

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Don't you agree that Family is one of the greatest gifts God gave ever us?
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Here's where things start to look bad: In a book entitled, The Death of the Family, a British physician suggests "doing away with the family completely because it is a primary conditioning device for a western imperialistic world view."

What???!!!

Kate Millet, is a very prominent feminist who wrote a book called Sexual Politics. In it she writes that the family must go because it oppresses and enslaves women.

Again, "What???!!!"

Dr. Armand Nicolai II of Harvard Medical School sees the trend to destroy the family as a "devastating trend." He points specifically to working mothers, the tendency for families to move frequently, an almost constant dominance of television and various media in the home, the lack of controls in society, the chaos of moral confusion, the lack of communication among families, and divorce. Let me quote from him. He says,

"These trends will incapacitate the family, destroy its integrity and cause its members to suffer such crippling emotional conflict that they will become an intolerable burden to society.

What about the future? First, the quality of family life will continue to deteriorate producing a society with a higher incidence of mental illness than ever before. Ninety-five percent of our hospital beds may be taken up by mentally ill patients.

This illness will be characterized by a lack of self- control. We can expect the assassination of people in authority to be frequent occurrences. Crimes of violence will increase, even those within the family. The suicide rate will rise. As sexuality becomes more and more unlimited and separated from family and emotional commitment, the deadening effect will cause more bizarre experimentation and wide-spread perversion."

Wow. Sound a little like the nightly news?

In graduate school, I studied the various approaches to family counseling: Contemporary Bowenian Family Systems, the Humanistic Approach championed by Virginia Satir, the Psychodynamic Approach that focuses on an individual's inner conflicts . . . and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. . .

Call me a skeptic of my own profession, but sociologists, psychologists, marriage and family experts, psychiatrists -- and even some who don't even have counseling credentials -- are scrambling all over the place to try to come up with some kind of solution -- some kind of "theory" or "counseling technique" to save us. They've been doing it now for a couple of decades with absolutely no impact at all!

There is no question that the family is under a major assault. There is no question that people want to redefine family in absolutely any terms they want. There's no question that we are watching a generation of young adults who have absolutely no socialization skills and no moral sense at all. It is chaos. This generation of young adults (and those behind them) have no idea what it's like to have a "world" of family living inside them.

Here's a newsflash for all secular family therapists -- AND the entire world: The idea and structure of the family comes from God's Himself and sets before us the example of a loving God to whom we are responsible. It begins and ends with FAMILY!

You can kiss your family and friends good-bye and put miles between you, but at the same time you carry them with you in your heart, your mind, your stomach, because you do not just live in a world but a world lives in you. . . because that's the way God created it!

Satan knows that if you destroy the family, the nation will follow. Sadly, even Christians who believe they are living by God's Word have given way and accepted the world's godless and abnormal patterns for families.

Too many people live in a world, but have no world living inside them. They have no connection to family. They have no precious threads weaving in and out of their lives connecting them to something bigger.

They may be an animal lover and not know why. . . .

God has so much to say about the family. So when we think about this whole subject, we must to start with His Word.

From there, we can start to talk about specifics. God's Word is a far better counseling theory than anything Ellis, or Bowen or Satir have offered . . . Oh sure, these theorists have some effective techniques, but as C.S. Lewis has rightly observed, to have a universal law, you must have a universal law giver. As the Creator and ultimate Authority of Family (and life itself!) only God can be the source of such law.

In the realm of Family, only God can prescribe the appropriate theories, values and principles to guide us in creating a family that can become a world that lives in us!

~ Esthermay Bentley-Goossen
© 2009 The Heart of a Pastor's Wife

This installment of InOtherWords is hosted by Nina on her blog: Mama's *Little* Treasures.