Dear God, I was reminded of a movie yesterday that is one of the great family dynamic movies (dysfunctional family as it may be) of all time: Little Miss Sunshine. It’s not clean. It’s profane. It shows broken people moving through a life situation together. Three generations with step children, half siblings, drug addicted grandfathers, suicidal uncles, etc. Just that sentence alone should scare me off, but it doesn’t.
We’d like to think that Christian families are different. If we love and fear you then your Holy Spirit will run all of the way through our families and make us whole, functional, loving, etc. But the truth is, for the most part, our families don’t look really that much different than this family. And this goes all of the way back to the Bible. There are very few biblical families who are much different than the family in Little Miss Sunshine. Even Jesus had a mother and brothers who thought he was crazy. David was a terrible father and husband with murder and rape among his children.
So as I think about the writer(s) of Little Miss Sunshine, the story that they were telling, and the hope to which they were trying to point us at the end, I wonder what the difference would be if the family–even one person in the family–worshipped you. Would there functionally be any difference?
My wife and I were talking last night about some of the issues in our own family and how we are living through them. And while there is not much my relationship with you can do to impact others, it can impact how I relate to others. It can impact how their actions towards me affect me. It helps me to take my eyes off of them to meet my needs and turn to you instead. I heard someone say at the beginning of COVID that we have made an idol out of certainty, but the things we try to put our certainty in will always fail us. Our economy. Our government, Our military. Our spouse. Our children. Parents. Etc. You get the idea. All of it is fragile and fallible. But you are the same yesterday today and forever. You are the only thing in which I can put my faith, and you never ever promised certainty.
Father, help me to know how to be the worshipper of you I need to be, how to be the husband I need to be, and how to be the father I need to be. Show me how to be a son, brother, uncle through my current circumstances. Show me what to do in each moment, but let it start with my worship of you.
In Jesus’s name I pray,
Amen
Emails to God 