Quiet Homes and Dysfunctional Families

Have you ever had that experience of family coming to visit--it could be grown kids coming home, parents coming to visit, siblings or other relatives--and then experiencing the quiet and almost lonely feeling when they are gone?

I'm talking about people that you really love and really miss and really don't want them to go--or you don't want to have to go.

I realize that there are families that don't get along. Families that rarely, if ever, keep in touch with one another. When they do call or visit, it's more out of a sense of guilt or obligation than out of love for one another.

I wonder if that's how God feels on Monday mornings. The kids have all gone about their own busy lives and won't be back again until next week--makes for a kind of lonely and quiet week. They may gather together once or twice during the week, but they don't really plan on including Him in their mid-week get-togethers. There will be no conversations during the week--unless we need something. We'll drop by on the weekend because we're expected to; not because it's what we really want to do. There are other things--more important things--that we would rather be doing. Things like being with our kids for sporting activities or a day at the lake. Surely God would understand our need for family time, right? Maybe we'll just skip our visit for this week...and maybe for next week, too. After all, what's the big deal with going to church? Isn't God everywhere?

The problem is that we don't acknowledge God everywhere. In fact, we pretty much ignore Him everywhere. He's like an old parent that is troublesome to acknowledge before our friends. We would rather that they didn't know that we belong to Him.

Weird thoughts, I know.
Just wondering...

John <><

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Walking the Walk

As a follower of Jesus, how does your walk draw people to Jesus? Do the things that you (we) do and say help or hurt the advancement of the kingdom?

Shouldn't the belief of a Christian (that salvation is in Jesus Christ alone) compel us to share the gospel with urgency? Shouldn't a follower of Jesus be a student of the things that He teaches in The Word? Didn't Jesus say that we can know a tree by its fruit?

Just things running through my mind this morning...

John <><

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Self Assessment: It's not all it's cracked up to be

I spent some time reading some of my past posts the other day. It started as a project of finding some past information that I've posted and ran into a hour or more of just enjoying some of my past reads. In one post from last month I linked to four previous posts that are about me. In re-reading them, I noticed that I'm a pretty good guy. Feel free to go read them. There is a lot of good stuff there. There is also plenty of stuff missing.

Truthfully, I'm not all that grand. We seldom come clean about our dark tendencies in self evaluation. If given an anonymous opportunity to point out my faults, I'm pretty certain my friends and family could come up with a list that would be long. If not long, at least emphatic about the negative traits on a shorter list.

It's not too difficult to be a nice guy at church. There is a certain expectation that people at church be...well, nice. And since we're only around church people for a couple of hours per week, how hard is it to throw on a fake "nice" persona for a couple of hours? Piece of cake, right?

What about work? Work is a little bit different in that some people appear to want to be jerks at work. I'd say that it's a pretty easy environment to be a jerk and a not so easy environment to be a nice person if being nice is still an act. It's more difficult to be nice because there are people that are not nice. At church, at least everyone is either nice or pretending to be nice. At work, there is more of the survival of the fittest, dog eat dog mentality that gives us permission to act without regard to others. Some meanness is in response to a previous act of meanness and will, of course, demand an additional mean response until everybody acknowledges mutual hatred for one another and agrees to live in relatively peaceful hatred with only an occasional jerk action to remind everybody that the contempt still exists.

Yeah, sometimes it reminds me of kids on the playground where bullies get away with bullying because everybody knows that nobody is going to do anything.  In any case, our work personas can be our work personas and they don't necessarily mean that we are like that outside of the work place. If it's an act, it does require us to be a better actor than the church actor because we're at work more than we are at church. Our work personality is probably a better indicator of who we really are than our church personality.

Not too long ago, a co-worker said that I was a nice person. The truth is that I have to work very hard at just not being a jerk. Of course, the comment came from one of the "nice" people and nice people are easier to be nice to and more forgiving when you are not.

I think there are a lot of bad actors out there--both at church and at work. It may be that I am one of them. It's pretty easy to write a post that inflates good qualities and claim them as the real you for readers that don't really know you and never interact with you outside of the blogosphere. It's not too difficult to fool a few people for a few hours a week at church. It's certainly possible to shield coworkers from your true personality and keep them outside of your life away from the work place. It's pretty impossible to fool the people that you live with.

Unfortunately, the people we love the most are also the people that get to see our ugliness the most. If there were ever people that could testify to the poor qualities of character that are mine, it would be my family. Sorry, guys. I'm still a jerk--working on it, but still a jerk.

Maybe it would be easier if everybody just realized it. Most people are self-centered jerks. Most people really don't care about our lives and only pretend to be interested in our stories about our kids/family/hobbies/whatever, so that they can tell you about there meaningless lives--which you probably don't care about, either.

Are there really people that are "nice people" in the world?
Yes! I believe there are.
And I believe that I know many genuinely nice people.
I believe there are also a great number of people that really want to be nice people--people (like me) that have to work very hard at not being a jerk all of the time.

I think that these are the people that make me smile. Maybe it's because there is a sort of kinship with them. Maybe knowing their struggle makes it easier to forgive their transgressions. Maybe seeing their "niceness" gives me hope that the good guys are holding their own in a world full of jerks that are waiting to help them fail and then laugh as they struggle to regain lost ground.

These are my people. We are jerks, but we don't like it. We are working on being nicer people. Please have patience with us. I realize that we don't deserve your patience and we haven't cut you any breaks in the past. But remember, you're better that we are. You are the nice people.

Recovering jerk, apprentice "nice" guy,
John <><

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Walk a Mile...

Given that I've been working on getting a little bit of exercise lately (and I want to emphasize the little bit part of that), one might think that this is going to be a post about the health benefits of walking...
...it's not.

It's a post about the adage of not criticizing somebody until you have walked a mile in their shoes.

Perhaps it's age, or perhaps it's being more aware of people around me that are finding themselves in situations that they once criticized others for being in. In any case, I seem to have encountered several recent instances of people having eye-opening experiences that have helped them to see people in a different light and to help me see people differently, as well.

I saw this picture posted on Facebook recently:

I think there are some good rules here--numbers 2 and 4 really jump out for me.

2) What others think of you is none of your business.

I don't buy into that completely, but I do understand that I don't need to be obsessed by what others think of me. Often, their thoughts are more about how I fit into their experiences than about what I might actually be experiencing. Number 4 turns it around and reminds me that I may not have the information to make an accurate judgment of somebody else.

4) Don't compare your life to others, and don't judge them. You have no idea what their journey is all about.

I hear a lot about people that are receiving some kind of social assistance--welfare, unemployment, disability payments, WIC--you get the idea. Often times, such recipients are looked down upon or thought to be too lazy to take care of themselves. Many times they appear to be able bodied persons and so we think that maybe they just don't want to work or are too lazy to find a job.

I do not doubt that there are wide abuses in programs that are designed to help people that are in need. But it is also true that there are real needs. There really are people that are terribly under-employed or are working without much needed health benefits. There really are people that have lost their jobs (through no fault of their own) and find themselves desperately needing help to feed their families. There really are people that appear to be perfectly healthy but are suffering from chronic pain or are unable to concentrate or use extremities because of an injury or illness.

And there really is such a negative stigma attached to getting help that the people in need are often humiliated and made to feel like second class citizens when they apply for the assistance.

If a person that we know to be on welfare or disability has a nice phone, expensive camera, nice clothes, nice car, whatever; it's not okay for us to make negative assumptions about their character. They could be gifts. They could be possessions from before a life changing event. They could be from a settlement that came from an injuring party. The thing is--we don't know.

In churches, we might look down on somebody that has been divorced. We don't know if it was an abusive relationship. We don't know if a spouse was unfaithful. We don't know if every effort was made to save the marriage. We just know that somebody is divorced and that must mean--well, it must mean something! Right?

What about an unmarried single parent? Now that's a situation that we can make a judgment on, right?
No. It's not.

Rather than continuing to go on ranting, let me just say that I think these are some good rules to follow.
Here's a quote I like that is attributed to several different people:
Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.

John <><

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Happy Families

"All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."  --Leo Tolstoy Anna Karenina

John <><

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Family Matters--a continuation...

It was a really good weekend!
Other than the initial drive of about eight hours in various states of rainy weather, it was a grand weekend of seeing the whole family! We got things started with a casual get together on Friday night.

One of the newest members to join our group is expecting the first great-grandchild in the Jerry and Leticia family. Naturally, somebody came up with the idea of a surprise baby shower! After eating sandwiches, chips, fruit and what-not, we gathered together and put Justin and Tiffany on the spot! I think that Justin was a bit surprised by the event. Tiffany, on the other hand, was a little more than shocked! It seemed that there were a couple of moments when she was struggling not to get emotional. Who wants to start crying in front of a bunch of people that you've just met?

I don't know what kind of family background Tiffany has, but I know that in this family, she is going to be loved on, teased, made fun of, protected, defended and made to feel welcome and a part of something that ought to define family.

In addition to Tiffany, Justin's older brother Jason introduced us to his fiancee, Jess, and my brother Steve brought his girlfriend, Michelle. I think that Michelle had managed to meet much of the family already, but a first for being with the whole gang of us.

I was thinking of how overwhelming such an encounter might be.

On the other hand, with such a large and diverse group of people, it would be difficult not to connect with somebody that has a similar job, hobby or other interest. Whether you own your own business, work for the government, serve in the military, work retail, health service, labor sector, banking, engineering, computers or a host of other occupations--or have made a career of being a stay at home mom; there is somebody here that can relate.

Figuring out how you're going to keep to your vegetarian diet at this gathering? No problem, we have vegans as a part of this family. We have people ranging from couch-potatoes to marathon runners; readers and non readers; sports nuts and those that really don't care for sports. We have those that excel in music (vocal and instruments) and those that can barely manage to select a genre on Pandora. Whether you are far right or far left on the political spectrum, we have someone that shares your views. We run the religious gamut from non-believers to preachers. We have connoisseurs of coffee and craft beer. We love hot and spicy...or not. We live in the rural Midwest and in large cities.

And we love each other.

The seventeen grandkids range from 35 years old down to eight...and they all get along. They played "Capture the Flag" until dark on Friday night and each side laughingly declared that the other side cheated. They played soccer on Saturday afternoon with the oldest declaring that he had earned the right to be the "lame cousin" and sitting the game out.

It has been so cool to hear what the kids have to say. Here are a few of the things I've heard or read:
"Hill family reunions are just the best!"
"My cousins are the very best"
"If I know you're visiting, I will have Starbucks." Grandmas are the best.
"This is a really cool family."

And my favorite from Friday night:
Mom (looking at the gathering of people): Jerry, look what we've started!
Dad: What are you blaming me for?!

Joining us for the day were all of the kids from my dad's sister's family with most of their kids and grandkids, and my dad's brother with his wife and one of their kids. I would echo the sentiments of my niece in saying that "My cousins are the very best!" It pains me that my kids don't get to see their cousins as often as I got to see mine, but I do rejoice in the way the get along when they do. The big kids are still the heroes and the little ones feel important every time somebody pays attention to their stories or plays their games.

Here are Mom and Dad with their grandkids and the women that their oldest grandsons have chosen:

And here is the whole gang minus Chris that couldn't be there.

John <><

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Family Matters

Blogging on the road this morning...

I'm enjoying coffee and oatmeal in the hotel breakfast area as the kids sleep in for a while. Today is the Hill Family reunion.

We all arrived in central Illinois yesterday and had a great evening together. Today's outdoor gathering looks like we will be blessed with sunny skies and temps in the mid 70s!

Only Chris is missing from the gathering as she has to deal with one of those jobs that is a 24/7 kind of deal.

Dad, Mom, six kids with their spouses/significant others, seventeen grandkids from 35yrs down to 8, three young women that have claimed the three oldest grandsons and one great-grand one the way! It was quite a gathering last night.

Today, we expect some of our cousins to join us so it will be an even larger gathering. There are plans for some of us to take in a baseball game tonight as the Cardinals' A team takes on the Cubs' A team.

I am looking forward to a grand day!
I hope that you have a wonderful weekend and wish that you all could come join us for lunch this afternoon!

John <><

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