Broken Families

So how was I able to relate my life to the first lecture? I thought about all the dysfunctional families starting from my own and going all the way back in time. When I was growing up, my mother and father had not been able to really be there for me or my siblings. My parents got divorced when I was 9 and a few years later, my dad gave up the right to visit us on weekends. He then basically disappeared from our lives. My mom remarried, but the man she married was a jerk and totally irresponsible, and couldn't hold down a job. So my mother worked hard to support a family of 7 (5 kids and 2 adults.) When she came home from work, she was drained and unable to give us kids the love and attention we needed. So in a sense, we were without parents. Our basic physical needs were taken care of but not our emotional ones.

I realized that both my mom and dad had not had perfect family lives either, which probably contributed to their divorce and other problems. My mom's father abandoned her and her mother when she was only a baby. My dad grew up feeling unloved by his father. But then I went even further and thought that probably my grandparents had had their own problems as well that got in the way of them being the loving parents they were meant to be. So if you look for the source of problems in families, you have to keep looking further and further back. Therefore, it made sense to me that the very first human ancestors were not mature and could not give their children the love and guidance they needed.  Hey, Cain killed Abel. Where were Adam and Eve when this was happening?  Obviously they did a terrible job at parenting, so much so that one of their children killed another. Even in this messed up world with all its problems, we rarely hear of a brother killing his own brother. So that first family must have been really messed up. And this family dysfunction has been passed on from generation to generation.

Somewhere along the line the buck has to stop being passed, the legacy has to be broken. Parents need to love each other with a love that can never be broken and then pass on that standard of love to their children. This was the purpose of Jesus. But I'll talk about that another time.

The second lecture explained how mankind separated from God and the ideal. Next time I'll talk about that and about how I was able to see parallels in my own life with it.