“What causes quarrels and what causes fights among you? Is it not this, that your passions are at war within you? You desire and do not have, so you murder. You covet and cannot obtain, so you fight and quarrel. You do not have, because you do not ask.” James 4:1-2

“Our eldest daughter, Ann, invited her college roommate to join our large family for Thanksgiving dinner. As families sometimes do, we got into a lively argument over a trivial subject until we remembered we had a guest in our midst. There was an immediate, embarrassed silence. “Please don’t worry about me,” she said. “I was brought up in a family too.”

“Alive and Changing: God speaks to us through our lives, we often too easily say. Something speaks anyway, spells out some sort of godly or godforsaken meaning to us through the alphabet of our years, but often it takes many years and many further spellings out before we start to glimpse, or think we do, a little of what that meaning is. Even then we glimpse it only dimly, like the first trace of dawn on the rim of night, and even then it is a meaning that we cannot fix and be sure of once and for all because it is always incarnate meaning and thus as alive and changing as we are ourselves alive and changing.” (Buechner, Frederick. Listening to Your Life. HarperOne. Kindle Edition.)

“I was brought up in a family too.” That is a funny line. It is a reminder that all of us have a variety of family experiences – many of them good – and many of them, well, not so good. I was lucky enough to be brought up in a good household – one that nurtured individualism bolstered by unconditional love. But not all people have that experience or have been lucky enough even to have been raised in a single, stable, household.

I find it of great solace that the bible is filled with familial distress – situations where sons treat their fathers rudely, and brothers seek to kill one another. It reminds us that family problems were endemic within family dynamics since the beginning of time. In other words, we are not alone when we are faced with arguments and dissention in the home – and among siblings. And even in the midst of these difficulties, G-d continued to speak – through a cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night – through the prophets – finally through Jesus Christ – and today through the presence of the Holy Spirit.

Jesus is about love – a love that is above all things – a love that does not change. G-d will speak to us in different ways throughout our lives, but the love of G-d through Jesus Christ will never waiver. 

Pastor Dave