“Family” has been on my mind a lot lately. I’m not talking about the people we’re born to, but rather the families we adopt through our lives. When I was a kid, I had a church family. My parents’ church friends were like aunts and uncles to us, their kids our cousins. Even though I haven’t been a member of that church for 17 years, and the church itself closed shop, those people are still important to us. When my father got sick, they were some of the first people I wanted to tell. I still get excited when there’s a chance I’ll get to see someone from “back home” (even though that home is only in the next town over).
As I grew up and migrated away from that family in standard teen-rebellion, I found some friends who kinda acted like kin. Unfortunately, that turned out to be one of those horrible dysfunctional families. I still have a few friends left from that era, but it’s not the same.
I had a couple of jobs that had that “we’re in this together” community, mostly in restaurants. There’s nothing like 20 waiters, half a dozen cooks, a few bartenders and buskids coming together to serve 500 meals in under three hours. When things are hot and busy, and out in the dining room everyone needs to look happy and under control, the rawest personalities come out to play. If you can still love a person after she’s knocked over your tray of 7 meals ready to head out the door, she’s a true sister to you. (I suppose if I had ever been a firefighter or been in military action I’d scoff at the idea that waiters can bond like that.)
Fast forward to the last couple of years. With my job being done 94% inside my home (thanks, modern technology, for allowing me to earn a living while in my jammies!), I was longing for that deep connection with people to who I’m not related. So I went to church. Problem is, the feeling of family just wasn’t there. I’m an import to this town, so I didn’t grow up with these people, and most of the folks close to my age go to the other service (I go to the traditional, because I’m not smart enough to keep up with the contemporary songs), and a lot of the people on the committees with me were 20-30 years my senior, etc.
Then I figured out that the lack of family here wasn’t the fault of logistics or age gaps or lack of decent social opportunities: it was me.
I started to realize that when I looked at someone I saw and internally criticized her personality flaws, I was locking myself off from that person. When someone looked like he wouldn’t fit in my preferred social group, I put up a wall. I don’t know if this was a sudden realization or something more gradual, but somewhere along the way, one morning I looked out at the congregation during communion and said to myself, “these are my people.”
I’ve done that every Sunday since. Because whether we like to embrace it or not, we are a family, and dammit I’m going to love them with everything I’ve got. I’m going to smile at people, I’m going to love them for who God made them to be, and I’m going to hope that they do the same. But if they don’t, it’s no matter. Jesus didn’t tell us to “love your neighbor if he loves you back and doesn’t irritate you by talking too much.” These are my people, and we’re in this together.
Sometimes, in the middle of worrying about building maintenance or budget issues, or trying to make sense of Robert’s Rules of Order, we lose sight of why we even bother to be part of a larger congregation. In this day of internet schools and ebooks and podcast sermons, I don’t need to head to church on Sunday morning to learn about how to love God. I need to go to church to learn how to love other humans. To truly learn that nobody is perfect, even me.
These are my people, and I love them, just how they are.
That’s a good post and a seriously good perspective. Family is something I think the church (the church universal, or maybe the american church in general) does in spite of itself a lot of the time. I look at my church, for example, which is a pretty good church all things considered. We are a family, we do love each other, we don’t gossip in a malicious way, old ladies did show up at my door with food when I had Ben even though we weren’t officially members and at the time I had a surly, atheist husband who kept answering that door in his bathrobe in the middle of the afternoon, etc. We have a good church.
But it’s not full of good people, exactly, just regular people. We don’t really do anything to foster a family feel. In fact, just about everything we do is age or sex segregated and even those things are kind of infrequent. All we really do is focus on Jesus and try and live that out and a family kind off happens as a by-product. I don’t know if you can make a group of people into a family intentionally. I think maybe it has to be a by-product of some higher commitment.
And also, like you, I was the problem 9 times out of 10. I think this is a common issue for people who have a strong internet social life but are disconnected from people in their communities. We can pick and choose our surrounding so completely on line that we kind of internalize the notion that all our friends can be just like us. We can make blanket assumptions about whole groups of people (bottle feeders, spankers, liberals, SUV drivers, etc.) and not ever have to look past anything. Our social lives begin to resemble an echo chamber more than a community. I remember meeting someone for a playdate and talking on and on about cloth diapers. Then I realized (when she never called again) that most of the world doesn’t give a flying hoot about what goes on a baby’s butt.
In real flesh and blood life, we don’t know that much about each other right away. Real flesh people at the church pot-luck don’t come with sig lines explaining exactly what they value. So we need to know how to initiate friendships and learn about each other and find where we fit in and it’s different than on line. Also we can’t find a group that’s perfect just hanging out waiting for us in the town square. We just can’t. On line I can get myself a group of breastfeeding and child focused but strict Christian SAHMs who have a Calvinistic bent and a yen for a minimalist life. I can keep them for years and love our interactions and judge every other potential relationship off that vibe. Well, go figure I never feel like I belong in the women’s sewing circle at the kid’s school! There are all kinds of people out there who require that I accept them warts and all. We don’t see many warts when folks are “1s and 0s”.
This is all disjointed, but it struck a chord in me. I need to learn how to serve and accept and love people for who they are and not get stuck on how they aren’t reflections of the perfection that is me. I wish you lived closer. I think we’d be friends.
I think we’d be friends, too. Some day I’ll come to Pennsylvania and we can hang out and accept each other’s warts in person.
But really, I’ve noticed that even people who don’t have much online interaction cut themselves off from one another for little reasons. It’s not just us web-based life forms.
That was some amazing insight and self evaluation. You made me tear up a bit.
Love you!
Now your tearing up made me get all misty. It’s like a sobfest up in here. Yikes!
You make me so proud!
I think that’s the whole point. All of us are our people, even the ones with different political beliefs, different backgrounds, different skin colors. Jesus said “Suffer the little children to come unto me,” and he didn’t add “As long as they’re little Jewish children like me” or any other qualifiers. That’s why I keep trying to recover from being a mean person.
I don’t feel that way about church, but I do feel that way about my little town. There are wonderful parts of my community and the majority of those wonderful things are the people who share my postage stamp of physical space. We don’t look like homogenized and we certainly don’t share a political platform or even a socio-economic status, but we are all good and caring. Mostly.