Families

 

Perspective.

Two small cardboard boxes, and two crammed A3 notebooks. I’ve a few more photos to locate and insert, and then I will take a breather from looking back at the past several generations.

Or will I?

Having spent a good three or four months compiling this record, I feel I know some of the family members from long ago. I feel surrounded by them, encouraged to know at least some of them loved Jesus and followed him. Maybe my faith is alive today because of the prayers in the past. I am sure of that.

There is a connectedness for us all, whether or not we can trace family roots very far back. I’ve seen what a relay race it is, passing the baton on to future generations. Having recorded that two hundred and fifty years ago, one set of multiple-great-grandparents were loyalists (supporting the Crown) in the Revolutionary War and were charged with treason, while two other sets of multiple-great-grandparents were fighting on the side of the Patriots (Americans), I better appreciate that choices that we make grow out of the matrix of the culture and times in which we live. Now we see through the glass darkly.

I don’t think it’s fair to judge those who went before and made decisions we criticise or disagree with. Our thinking is so conditioned by cultural circumstances and understandings of the times and places in which we live.

Our only hope is to continually ask God to transform our thinking by the renewing of our minds, to save us from making calls which condemn others to injustices and to save us from judging others – both those who lived out of the culture of another time or place, and also those who live alongside us but whose experiences and lives have been shaped by circumstances and situations we don’t know of and wouldn’t be able to fully understand.

We are all works in progress, called to be kind and loving in this increasingly hard-hearted world. God give me your grace today to walk close to you, and when I falter, to rest between your shoulders, as I walk alongside relatives and friends, all of us just walking each other home in the best way we can.

Help me to leave the judgments to you.

Give me your perspective, Lord. Have mercy on this wounded world. Maranatha.