The Void made by Family

Ruth's sister and grandma have been it town for the past week, It has been a lot of fun to have them here. While they were I started to think about Family and what the role of the family is, both now and back in the first century. I personally think that the community is vital to the Christian life and I have the tendency to place it as the most important to Christian life, but no matter what I think about community I know that family is the most defining of all groups that a person will ever be in, even if the family group is non-existent it will still effect someone very deeply.

In the Old Testament the family was huge, ever week you had a whole day where you wouldn't be able to do anything except hang out at home with, guess who, your family. This was also a culture in which most people lived and died within 10 to 20 miles of where they were born, in the case of women many times they would never move out of their fathers house. In this environment Family was top dog, you had to be close to your family because there was no way to get away from them. Not only did you have to like your family, but at first glance there was a huge amount of pressure for the parents of the family to live right and set good examples for there children.

Moving into the New Testament there seems to be change in thinking, from the family driven society to a community driven society. With this change we call other Christian brother and sister, we think of God as are father, there is less of a family focus and more of a community focus. With trade routes becoming easier to travel and the access to ships becoming more common place you find people going to more distant places and stating for long periods of time. Even in this new mind set, however, the Bible still places a huge emphasis on the family which can be seen in places like Ephesians 5 and 6, the Bible says to judge potential elders and deacons of the church by how good of a family they have.

All of this leading us down to today is the 21st century and what is the role that family is taking today. In today's culture family seems to have taken a back seat, and there are many things that you can point at as being the cause of that, myspace, facebook, everyone in a house have there own computer/tv/cell phone. But I know a lot of people who have that and there families are very strong, so that leads me to believe that, while the things listed above might not help the situation, the big problem is complacent leadership in the family. Parents have stopped making defining memories for their kids, traditions that can be passed down from generation to generation. Now the traditions that I see being passed down are giving up, running a way. I don't see how people can look at families in this society and say that on the whole we are doing a good raising the next generation, the divorce rate is higher then 50% and rising every year, even in houses that might have both parents still together there is no unity or "togetherness".

None of this is to say that communities that have been created in the void made by family are bad, if fact I love them, but I do think that there is a point at which we have to stop and look around us and say 'we need to figure out where we came from'. Learning from our parents and grandparents mistakes is what keeps us from repeating them, learning from our family is also what ultimatly guides us in are communities and, in the end, helps us to guide our families.