It’s a few days after the beginning of the New Year, and the house is a wreck. We’ve had the goodness and grace of unstructured days. We’ve focused more on being inside our home and haven’t run so wildly on the outside.
We’ve had time to connect and time to converse. We’ve lived, as a family, with paths leading together rather than streaming steadily apart.
But our home is disheveled.
Dishes pile, ominous and high, in the kitchen sink. Hampers overflow. The dog has shed on even the curtains, and the rugs haven’t been vacuumed for days.
Isn’t this how family life often is?
Not just our physical homes, but the living, breathing people inside?
Not quite perfect. A little out of order. Sometimes, when we peel away the shine and veneer we try to uphold, a bit of a mess.
As the old year is gone, and we stand, with open arms, already in the new, I’ve been thinking about real life. Genuine days and the tough stuff that can happen within.
I’ve been thinking about real people–flesh and blood spiritual soldiers in shove-up-your-sleeves and push-on-through situations. People bonded together, working through troubles, living out faith.
Real families in real circumstances.
When I consider families, our own and many of those we hold dear, it comes to heart that the things we wish to have, to hold, are sometimes different from what we can wrap our arms around. Different from what we hold against our chests.
Sometimes a real family struggles and stretches and strives, and what we want to hold is happiness.
Sometimes, a real family bears wounds and healing seems not quite in sight, and what we want to hold is health.
Sometimes the circumference of a real family circle can be a bit torn. There can be broken people with broken pieces, and our deepest desire is to hold wholeness.
Often, real families can be in a place of warring against something or waiting for something.
I believe that real families learn to hold hope.
Rejoice in hope, be patient in tribulation, be constant in prayer. (Romans 12:12, ESV)
I’m learning, as we work through some family circumstances, to rejoice in hope. Hope, when we belong to the Lord, means that His activity is ever-present. It means that His mercy and grace moves beyond even what we were made to understand.
It means that there is nowhere, no circumstance, no situation that we will traverse alone. Hope means that He is always with us and nothing can separate us from His concern or care. Hope means that we’re covered in always-abundant, never-changing, far-reaching love.
Hope means that we are held.
Our family will return to routine soon. We’ll wash dishes. Scrub floors. Vacuum curtains and rugs. We’ll go back to work and back to school, and we’ll do the best that we can to get our house back in order.
But for the part of home that really matters–the precious people inside?
This real family will hold hope.
And in God’s grace, it’s enough.
