How bad or dysfunctional does your family have to be to NOT fit?
I’ll try to think of one:
Great things are expected of your dad. But before you’re born he leaves his religion and marries a woman the family would never accept. They have three kids. Two of the kids die and the family story is the kids were so bad that even God was outraged.
Then your dad sleeps with a prostitute. She gets pregnant. Turns out she is actually his daughter-in-law, the widow of one of his dead sons, in disguise. She has twins. You’re the first born twin.
So your dad is also your step-dad-grandfather-in-law (or whatever) and you are the offspring of incest. And let’s say this is just one ‘highlight’ and you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.
Let that be a bad enough example for the moment.
So what happens to you? How does THIS fit?
Well, your name is Perez and you are in the line of Jesus Christ. And your dad is Judah, leader of one of the twelve tribes of Israel. Kings and the Messiah will come from him. His descendants still live in Israel today, a distinct national people 3,500 years later.
God did not hide you or your dad or your origin away in shame. He overcame the shame.
You can see yourself in Genesis 38. The first time I read it I thought, “Wow, I wonder what happened to him.” Because, you know, with such a bad family and start, no good could come of that. Right?
A lot was at stake with this family. This was the beginning of the earthly family that was to result in the birth of the perfect one-of-a-kind Jesus Christ on his mission from God to save the world. So does it fit?
A disrespectful person might say, C’mon God, for such an important family you can do better than this, can’t you?
Do better? Maybe this IS ‘better’ to God.
My great grandfather abandoned his family
Our story is that his son, my grandfather, then changed the spelling of our last name to forever separate himself from his dad. The echo of this is heard with me generations later every time I say, “that’s M-O-R-L-A-N-D with no ‘E.”
But, it’s only an echo. Our family was not ‘destined’ to a straight-line repetition and payment for one person’s sin. It’s consequences have altered our family but not trapped us into a destiny.
Your destiny is a river and your parents are in the same boat as you.
THEY had a family and parents that they probably wish were different. And THOSE parents wished their parents were different.
It’s hard for the blame to stick once you link your happiness, destiny, and situation to a family and to parents. If you can pass the blame back upriver, so can they. It then gets passed back forever.
Stop the chain. Accept your family (or lack of one) as under God’s overall will and accept his ability to use it for good. Then let him.
My dad’s dad was an alcoholic. My dad was an alcoholic. I am an alcoholic. My kids are NOT alcoholics. I wrote an ebook on how the chain stopped. If God can stop that chain with me, he can stop yours with you.
Perez didn’t have a pedigreed family, yet that family was part of royal business. It’s as if God does it on purpose, to prove something. Will you let him prove something through you?
What is God proving in your family experience?
The Everything Fits affirmation:
Everything about my life, everything that happens
– the family I was born into
– the circumstances I have experienced and find myself in
– my personality and DNA and wiring and gifting –
is engineered or permitted or governed by a sovereign, just, loving God who always has three good things in mind
1) to develop my personal relationship and intimacy with him
2) to accomplish his purposes in the world, and
3) to further his own awesome, unmeasurable aims that are bigger than my ability to understand.
Therefore, whether it’s past, present, or future, I can have confidence and peace that somehow, someway, Everything Fits Even When It Doesn’t, and I will trust and cooperate with God in the fitting.
