Reflection This Week
FAITH
AND FAMILY
A week or so ago
I woke up in the middle of the night wrestling with a question that
was, for some reason, on my mind. The reason I woke up was that I
had foolishly eaten something that had caffeine in it (a fudge bar)
at around 8:00. I knew better. I thought my tiredness would defeat
the caffeine and I could sleep all night. The caffeine, as usual,
won and there I lay, wide-awake and wondering what was more
important in my life: my faith or my family.
How long I stayed
awake I don’t know; but by the time I fell off to sleep again, I had
concluded that my family was more important than my faith. When I
awoke and began to replay my middle-of-the night debate with myself,
the clerical side of me wondered how I could have made such a
choice: family more important than faith? Explain that to God, will
you? Okay, but how do I say to my family that my faith is more
important to me than they are?
Ah, impaled on
the horns of a dilemma, as my old philosophy prof would say and then
about which he would wax eloquent for a while until he put us all to
sleep no matter how much caffeine we had prior to class. He would
have begun by reminding us, were he to address my problem, that both
faith and family are vital to our life in this world and that one
could make an honest case as to which is more important, if one were
forced to make such a case, of course. Yet, in the end, we might
still be impaled.
Thus, to begin:
both faith and family are gifts and gifts from God. Faith is a gift,
pure and simple. Why God gives me the gift to believe but does not
give that same gift to someone else is beyond my understanding. I
know many, many families where one sibling is a devote believer and
another is an atheist. Why? Only God knows.
The family into
which I was born is also a gift. It was not of my choosing. I was
born into it. This is not to say that I wish I were a member of
another family any more than it is to say that I wish I did have the
gift of faith. On the contrary, I could not be more pleased about
either of those gifts. Further, while the family I have helped to
create as well as my extended family (church, friends) are of my
choosing, they are all also God’s gifts.
It is to say,
after even more wrestling with the issue, that both gifts are of
equal value, at least for me, and, I would hope, for everyone. It is
our family that supports us when we have faith issues and it is our
faith that supports us when problems arise in the family, no matter
what those problems may be: personal or family health issues, job
loss, teenager obstinacy, for instance. Our faith, our God, will get
us through, somehow in some way.
Our faith in God
is what allows us to deal with very difficult and demanding family
issues knowing that God’s grace will see us through. The love of our
family – nuclear and extended – supports us when our faith is tested
for whatever reason it is tested.
In our life
and throughout our life there is faith and there is family, these
two. The greater of these is neither. We need one to support the
other. If we are to be impaled on the horns of any dilemma, this is
one we all might choose. Knowing that and having the support of
faith and family should allow us to sleep better even when we have
had too much caffeine before we headed off to bed. WJP
