Jonathots Daily Blog
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Things become popular because they make us feel good about ourselves without challenging us to improve. The sensation is so intoxicating that we’re often willing to bottle lies in order to guzzle it down.
This is how we arrive at the infamous Populie, “Family is everything.”
It is really an Old Testament approach to believing that our particular lineage, descendants and tribe have been granted a special anointing from on high–superior in some way to other groups in our nearby community.
Even though in the Good Book, Jesus makes it clear that if you love those who love you, you’re no better than the heathen, we are on some sort of “birthright high” right now, in pursuit of giving extra love to those who possess our DNA.
You might ask, “What’s the big deal? So what if people embrace their own personal households with greater intensity and fervor than they do the other humans around them? Isn’t that natural?”
When you become too intensely involved in your own concerns, you are a clan–and I’m not talking about the Ku Klux version. A clan is just a group that gets together and says, “We are us.”
It sounds like a celebration of life, but clans quickly become clubs. Clubs: “We are different–and special.”
Once you’re a club, you may find it necessary, in order to keep your rendition pure, to become a cloister. “We are separated from everyone else so as to remain free of interferance.”
And unfortunately, cloisters quickly become cliques: “We are better.”
So the same segregation which occurs in high school, forbidding a nerd, a geek, a jock and a prom queen from interacting, is continued on in adulthood, as we establish our own form of that campus life in our family.
We are us too easily becomes we are different–and special. Since we are special, we need to be separated, so we can celebrate how much better we are.
And I must tell you, whenever any group of people are convinced that they are better than others, they soon feel compelled to hurt, or even kill, the inferiors.
What should we feel about family?
- We are blessed to have one.
- It is a great climate for learning patience, and how to treat all people.
- We have a fellowship in agreement with the principle that we are going to love the whole world.
The Old Testament was full of families. When Jesus came on the scene, he started talking about the whole world.
So I will tell you–I am a family man who takes the experience I have with my own kin to reach out to the kindred of the earth.
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Jonathots Daily Blog 