Before I married, I thought two kinds of families existed: the broken and the ideal. After I married, I realized family functioning is not a matter of good and bad, black and white, success and failure.
One of the things that attracted me to my husband, Brandon, was his love for what I thought was his ideal family—no divorce, addictions, dysfunction, or instability. But as time went on, I took off my rose-colored glasses.
Now don’t get too excited. No major skeletons escaped from his family’s closet. (I can feel my mother-in-law breaking out in hives just reading this.) I finally understood, however, that none of us has the perfect family tree; even the most pristine family has a kooky cousin in an offshoot branch.
I am broken. You are broken. Even Jesus’s family was broken. We strive for perfection. We try to pretend we are perfect. We might even convince ourselves we are perfect. But we are all—at our core—a mess. We all need a Savior to come alongside us and pour His love on us. We all need Jesus to save us from our sins, heal our broken family trees, and save us from the fallen world in which we live.
The first step in preparing to unpack and discard our baggage is this: admitting that we have baggage and acknowledging that the mess we are toting around is too heavy for us to carry on our own. If you want lasting change, ask God to help mend your broken branches. He can, and He will; “with God all things are possible” (Matt. 19:26 NIV).
The next step in preparing to unpack your baggage is accepting the fact that you did nothing wrong to deserve the harsh treatment you endured while growing up. Releasing self-blame takes lots of time and emotional work. It requires understanding, empathy, forgiveness, and healing.
We don’t have the luxury of choosing our circumstances, but we do have the ability to choose our responses to our circumstances. We don’t have the ability to choose our story, but we do have the privilege of choosing what we will do with it. We can run from it or embrace it. We can ignore it or use it to help others. We can allow the Enemy to take control of our lives, or we can use our testimony for God’s glory.
Today, instead of wishing my past looked different, I embrace it. I want to use it for God’s glory. I want the world to know God’s protective hand is over us, drawing us into deeper relationship with Him even when it seems as if our lives are spinning out of control.
What about you? What do you wish you could change about your past or your family of origin? Why? What would supposedly be better?
