All in the Family

I grew up in a big family, the oldest of nine. We were close, the kind of closeness that only poverty can create. When I say we didn’t own a car until I was in high school, I get one of those yes-and-you-walked-ten-miles-to-school looks. I remember carefully studying and analyzing the Sears Big Book in the weeks before Christmas preparing for that all important decision: what one gift could I get this year. Sharing ideas with brothers and sisters. It didn’t matter that what looked so good on the glossy well-worn Big Book page, didn’t quite match up by late on Christmas day.  Our family is still, what you might consider, close. Although many I see but once a year. I keep up with many of them either because they’re on Facebook or, in the case of my baby brother, we share a passion for UL sports. It’s always good when I’m with one of them and the days of growing up together, days that were somehow better, don’t seem that far away.

I think we’ve lost the sense of family. I see a generation whose concept of family is too loose and too complicated. Divorce, separation, and non-marrying are all taking a toll. I guess that’s why something like Facebook is so successful. We really do want to know that Fred’s dog messed up the rug or see that picture of Mary’s kid after he/she got into the laundry basket. We laugh about Too Much Information while inside we weep from too little real connection. Social sites fulfill an otherwise unmet need for contact and closeness. But all the texting, emailing, Facebooking in the world doesn’t fulfill the need for one-on-one contact. We are so electronically connected and yet emotionally and physically disconnected. 

Try this sometime. Show a personal interest in that surly gal at the supermarket checkout and watch her change. See her face light up because some stranger showed some minimal interest in her life. Families with a Dad and a Mom and nine kids (eight of them wearing hand me downs) are a thing of the past. This generation is growing up with incomplete and disconnected families. This isn’t a “pro-family” or anti-anyone rant.  It’s just a nostalgic recollection of when things were pretty bad economically, but were a lot better otherwise.

How well do you know the person who works next to you all day or sits next to you on Sunday? That’s assuming you’re in church on Sunday, as I reveal my old-fashioned ideas. So let’s modernize it: How much do you know about the person sitting next to you in the club or rubbing elbows in a crowd. Disconnectedness used to be an urban disease. It’s gone country.  Do you even know that by not really knowing others, that you’re missing out?

I’m going to set aside my i-devices this weekend. I’m going to one-on-one with my Kairos family and my church family and even a couple of my family family. It won’t change the world; but it will make my world a bit better. It will make me recall a time when we cared because we were really connected, physically, personally and emotionally, if not electronically 

What you think?

Nick