Family Conflicts and the Holidays

If you’ve ever listened to my testimony, you know that I come from a bit of a challenging family background.

Thankfully, I have a good relationship with my mom, dad, and sister now. But every once in awhile, waves of emotions related to my past will splash over me (and often feel like they’re drowning me). This is especially true around the holidays.

I don’t know why the holidays can be so tempting to feelings of sadness, loneliness, and dissatisfaction with family relationships. Maybe it’s the canned, fake sentimentality of a “Folgers Christmas Commercial” perfect family. Maybe it’s genuine grief over the effects of sin on this fractured life in a fallen world. Probably, it’s a combination of the two.

Whatever the secondary causes, I know that at their foundation, my struggles are about my heart—my desires, fears, longings, lack of faith, lack of gratitude, sadness … humanness.

And this week? As I looked forward to my father’s visit on the one hand and feared it on the other? When emotions from 30+ years ago felt as raw and real as they did in 1978? Well, I did what I always do … I ran to the church.

I’m still cringing a bit over my wording (spontaneous prayer request times do not usually lend themselves to well-organized or pithy oratory, at least for me) … but I’m very grateful that I stood up in church on Sunday morning and (shaking a bit and feeling weak and stupid), asked for prayer for my heart as I sought to serve my dad and his wife this week.

Many people have been so kind to let me know that they are praying. (One woman who I don’t even know very well, but I sure HOPE to get to know better, even stopped by with a ribboned package of homemade cards for me to open throughout the week when I need encouragement and a little love. Can you believe that? People are SO cool.)

And I credit their prayers with not only a day-by-day, minute-by-minute “OK-ness,” but also a fairly radical moment of conviction for me earlier in the week.

It came as I was thinking about what it might look like for me to remember Christ in the moments when I am tempted to hold a grudge or be ungrateful, critical, graceless, or just plain ol’ mean. I thought to myself, “What does mercy look like in this moment? What would it mean to actually breathe grace / live the gospel / be a Christian in this moment?”

And I realized that it would mean that I would interact with my father as though he had a perfectly clean slate before me.

Rather than treating him based on things that happened (or didn’t happen) in my childhood, I would see before me a human being. (And in his case, a very frail, old, sick human being.) And I would have mercy on him and accept him as he is (rather than holding against him all the things he is not).

I would look for ways to be real, genuine, and authentic in my care of him (and his wife).

I would pray for him and be brave in actually reading the Bible to him (if he would so allow) and discussing it with him (if he would so allow).

I would be careful to treat him at least as well as I would treat a stranger in my midst. (Because it hit me—if I could be kind to a STRANGER, how could I not be kind to my own FATHER?)

Don’t you think that my little progression of grace just HAS to be from the One, True, Powerful, Almighty, All Loving, All Knowing, Forgiving, Gracious, Triune God? I do. And I am very grateful.

Thanks for the prayers, friends.

May we all enjoy a blessed, gracious, gospel-filled Thanksgiving.

With love,
Tara B.