Family Day Amazements

Call it a clan, call it a network, call it a tribe, call it a family: 

Whatever you call it, whoever you are, you need one.  

Jane Howard

He sets the lonely in families.

Psalm 68:6

This Family Day weekend thing still feels relatively new to me.

Never mind that it's been happening since 2008 (thank you Dalton McGinty).

Just a little bonus in the middle of winter in that long stretch between Christmas and Easter,, and we'll call it a day to just be family.

And while my own family hasn't ever set up specific traditions to mark this day, I welcome any chance to be reminded of the richness of belonging, and the abundance of grace required to do so.  

For me, the gift of family has held me graciously in the roles of wife, grandmother, and mother predominantly.  And I do know without question, that I am held graciously by so much forgiveness and benefit of the doubt and humility to buffer and buoy the abundance of inadequacies with which I have attempted to fulfill those roles.   To my utter astonishment, they love me anyways.  And I guess that's the best definition of family I can come up with.

In a wider lens, there is family with faith, and family half way around the world, and friends that become family simply because they show up in your life 'closer than a brother' (Proverbs 18:24) and just don't go away no matter how messy it gets.

Sometimes I feel like the richest woman in the world.

And none of it is easy.

And none of it comes cheap.

And no one is painting idyllic pictures of us around a table, believe me.

And when we do smile for the camera, in any of the iterations of family to which I belong, it's real.  There's joy.  But's the joy that comes from a story that also has desperate chapters where we thought for sure we weren't going to make it.  But we did.  We held on.  And today we're loving each other anyways to everyone's great astonishment.

And come to think of it, the more I think of it, the more impossible family seems. 

How unlikely. 

That we would do this with each other, and survive.

Even thrive.

But I think that when any group of people, 

bonded by blood or by choice, 

keeps holding on to each other by grace 

and forgiveness 

and benefit of doubt, 

keeps showing up when it gets ugly, 

and keeps astonishing each other with love, 

that's family.

So be it a clan, a network, a tribe, a church, or whatever you call it where you belong,

Happy Family Day.

May you feel the grace that holds you.