Rushed Family

My coming of age happened just in time for me to vote in 2016. (Can I leave a Yelp review on years?) I was sufficiently disillusioned with the reliability of human goodness that I supported Bernie Sanders as a countercultural candidate – a decision that has haunted me ever since, as there are people in my life still worried that I’m a card-carrying communist. (Love you, thank you for reading my blog regularly, and I can’t wait to see you at Christmas!)

I’m not here to discuss the difference in various socialist ideologies though. Since becoming a born-again Christian, I’ve stopped finding my identity in politics, but some of my criticism has found roots in Genesis 3: everything designed, populated, and powered by humans is subject to human folly and fallenness. I think Churchill was expressing a similar sentiment when he said, “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others we’ve tried.”

But today, and in the spirit of the holiday season, I would like to narrow my focus. Rather than discussing the systems of governance and socioeconomics we find ourselves subject to, I want to take a moment to lament a personal, yet commonly experienced, wrong done by those systems.

Why do Americans move?

Fun fact: in North America, just under 25% of the population moves each year (moveBuddha). That’s three times our European contemporaries and the global average. That same post lists major reasons why people move, and the top one likely to take you to a different city is for a new job or a relocation. North American Moving Services ran a poll that validates this – their poll found that the most common reason for moving was for work.

Anecdotally, my personal story lines up with this, or even contributes to that high average. Since I was born into the first house I ever lived in, I’ve moved into ten permanently enough to change my address. In seasons, I followed my parents’ careers and education, then went to college myself. After I graduated and got married, I started following my wife’s career and moved to a new state in 2020 (again – where’s Yelp for years?), then again this past year for her first residency. We’ll probably be moving again next year for another residency, then the year after that for her first job. Odds are, I’ll have moved a dozen times before I’m 30 years old, and all but two of those will have been for professional advancement.

I say all this not to put anyone on blast – these are all people I love, most of all myself if the Bible is to be believed. Rather, I’m approaching the part where I steal a literal page out of Comer’s book and say “Something is Deeply Wrong”, and I want to frame that as a critique of the culture and society we find ourselves in – not as a personal attack on the people subjected to its whims and demands.

Something is Deeply Wrong

If you’ve been following my blog, you know I’ve been reading through John Mark Comer’s book, The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry, and I’ve found a lot of good things in it. Among them is what I think is one of the starting points for sharing the Gospel: he titles a chapter “Something is Deeply Wrong”. Even if some people don’t share the Christian worldview which includes an external and authoritative definition of what is “right”, most of them still have a deep understanding that there’s a lot of things that don’t fit the bill, and can share examples.

In that chapter, Comer points this feeling at the daily microcosm of spiritual deadness in our personal, day-to-day lives. The hectic pace at which the vast majority of Americans live life, never taking down time or maintaining the things they care about, wears on our bodies, minds, and our very souls. This discussion has been ongoing outside of his book; burnout was the pandemic before COVID, and in recent years several of the secular thinkers I follow have dedicated their annual goals to rest, work-life balance, or even an explicit weekly sabbath in one case.

Many of these same people, as well as influential Christian leaders, have discussed a phenomenon that I think is closely related: loneliness. The loneliness epidemic has largely coincided with both burnout and COVID, and Comer mentions in his book that relationships are one more category that suffers when we deny ourselves rest. However, I think this topic in particular warrants deeper inspection, specifically with a wider view over time. Something to tie it into the grand scheme that others talk about.

The Utility of Family

You Need Family to Make Family

Much like money, family begets family.

Even the secular thinkers, while pontificating on the declining birth rate in the first world, look back at the traditional family structure and have to acknowledge it serves a purpose. Many will say that its utility is exactly why its tradition dates back so long: generations complement and support one another throughout their various stages of life. The oldest generation, unable to labor as their physical health decline, can still function as leaders and guide the younger generations with their wisdom. In particular, they can help carry some of the load of parenting, both with experience and taking on some of the tasks. If the younger adults have someone to lavish their children at least occasionally, that gives them an opportunity to rest, to do work (in or out of the house), and to generally live fruitful lives without becoming a recluse to rear their children.

And I wouldn’t bring this up in a positive light if I didn’t think it was supported by scripture. Even in my own dalliance with theological anthropology, my conclusion was that people were made for community – togetherness, to support one another, and to fundamentally enjoy company. I think this is supported both in the family values of the Israelite culture of the Old Testament, but also the writings of the New Testament. How many times is the Church referred to as a family? How many people does Paul refer to as his brothers and sisters, or even as his mother (Romans 16:13) or son (as in his greeting in 1 Timothy)?

Spiritual Family is Family

Your spiritual family should truly be family. There are people (including yourself) with practical needs in your congregation, and those needs should be met by the congregation according to James 2:15-16. (Note the familial language here.) In fact, I think the congregation should be ready to replace birth families. If the widow and orphan cannot find the support and relations they need in the Church, where else should they turn? What hope does such a congregation offer to those whose families reject them? Jesus himself says that birth families will reject those who are faithful to him, as in Mark 13:12 and Matthew 10:35.

I think this could be a radical call for the American church to examine how it practices sacrificial and selfless love, particularly in caring for parents without extended family. That, however, is a post for another time. For now, I’ll simply say this: even if your congregation isn’t truly family, you should have deep connections to some of the people in that congregation, and there are explicit calls to support and build up one another.

So we are not only called to make families, both spiritual and biological, but we are designed to for them. In acknowledging we are fallible and finding support in those who love us, we see the beauty in others and the necessity and joy of loving them in return. But how does this fit with our transient lifestyle, in which a career – perhaps God’s call on your life – could take you states away from the family you know? How do you handle the new family that springs up so far from the old?

Moving Away, Moving Towards

There’s one answer that seems so obvious that it almost makes the question rhetorical: where relationships and worldly culture run contrary to one another, we must choose to which our loyalties truly lie. However, I think that advice is reductive. Where two ideas run contrary to one another, it doesn’t create a single fork in the road; it creates a tension that forces us toward one side of the path or another. There will certainly be many forks, opportunities we are denied because of which way we allow ourselves to be pulled, but choosing one direction does not sever the rope pulling us the other way.

I think that’s demonstrated in the most recent time I moved. To follow my wife’s career advancement, I had to turn down a job opportunity and restart my own job search. We left behind our spiritual family in Pittsburgh, but moving to Richmond brought us far closer to our birth families in the Carolinas – just in time to see my wife’s dying grandfather one weekend, and attend his funeral the next. And though we were exhausted and without a local support network for weeks, we’ve now found a rich community to be a part of, and the Lord has given us much growth through this season.

That, I think, is the beauty of it: God’s plan works in spite of us far more than it works because of us. Even as weighty decisions loom – where to spend holidays, what kind of travel we have time and money for, whether the job is really worth the move – we can rest easy in the counsel of God, knowing what we have is His, and what He will do is good. Growth doesn’t come from walking in Pittsburgh or in Richmond, but with God, wherever you are.

Jesus calls us to follow him, even if it means giving up wealth or family. He does not promise us an easy life, but a good eternity. And perhaps that’s the ultimate consolation: that whatever we give up in this life, we will have an eternity to get back in a form more pure and good than we can even fathom. In his own words:

And everyone who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or children or lands, for my name’s sake, will receive a hundredfold and will inherit eternal life.

Matthew 19:29

If I can give you any advice, or distill any lesson I’ve been taught, it’s this: be faithful where you are. God has put you there, and whatever situation is in front of you, He put it there too. All you need to do is stay faithful; He’ll bring you to the other side of it too.