Summertime sanctification

I’m writing this from the basement suite (I’m a basement guy) of a large-ish AirBnB probably 20 paces from the beautiful rocky shores of Lake Huron. I’m also a Lake Huron guy. I prefer its cold, rocky waters to sandier, warmer, touristy-er, Chicago-money-infested waters of Lake Michigan. I prefer its small towns to those on the west side as well. These are sleepy towns where you don’t have the option of dropping $70 on a pastel sweatshirt that says “Charlevoix.”

This annual trip has been an exercise in spending time with aging in-laws, watching nieces and nephews grow older, sometimes watching them get engaged and married, while at the same time not feeling much different myself. At times I think things like, “I can’t believe my good fortune in being able to look out my suite window and see the beauty of God’s creation. … Listen to those waves!” At other times I think things like, “Who are these people and how did I end up here?”

This, I think, is what it feels like to be in a family.

It is an exercise in having the same banal conversations at the Big Group Dinner that we had four years ago and then splintering off into comfortable subgroupings to gossip and have the real conversations that are actually fun. I was floating on a raft today, talking about somebody in the family who hadn’t spoken to somebody else in a decade, and heard myself saying the words, “That’s just family. … It’s always a mess.”

Which is both incredibly cynical and absolutely true. Families are barnacle-crusted, secret-keeping vessels of death and decay. They can also sometimes be cool and fun. They can sometimes be redemptive and sanctifying.

I also attended a family wedding this summer, which was lovely, and emceed the reception— during which I both felt like a.) this is amazing and God bless these kids, and b.) they just signed up for a wild ride and have absolutely no idea what they’re in for. Because they’re young and hormonal and in love and high on their own dreams and hubris, they have no idea what it will feel like to not be able to sleep at a family gathering to such a degree that you go outside and lay down in your car just be in a space that is yours. (I’ve done this.) Or what it will feel like to just wish their kids would go to bed already or what it will feel like to have their income or their parenting be silently judged by someone of the older generation. Which is now, potentially, me.

These are the things nobody tells you before you get married, and the things that you spend decades peeling back the proverbial layers of. It’s a rite of passage and a reality that nobody in the Christian marriage/family/have-a-perfect-family cottage industry wants you to know. Behind every perfectly coiffed, lined-up-on-the-beach-in-our-matching-khakis-and-white-shirts photo, somebody isn’t talking to somebody, somebody else has cancer, somebody is infertile and heartbroken, somebody is kicking the tires on Catholicism, somebody doesn’t feel like they belong, and somebody is oblivious to the whole thing.

In my particular theological subculture, there’s a real push to get married as early as possible and start popping out babies every nine-ish months or so. This is good, I guess. I don’t know. I also know that there is a good bit of smug pride still attached to these ideas even though sometimes it works out and sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes mom looks elated with her brood, and sometimes she looks like she wishes she could die in her sleep. This, too, is normal. Smugness is fun, but it doesn’t get your son to potty-train and doesn’t get your daughter to stop texting the slack-jawed idiot she’s currently obsessed with.

Time, chance, and family happen to us all. If we know Christ, sanctification happens to us all, too, and often through the very family that we thought would be perfect. If your family isn’t perfect this summer, there is hope for you. The Bible spends time on the Proverbs 31 wife, but it also gives a lot of ink to quarrelsome wives and foolish sons and what to do and how to pray when you’re despairing. For this, I’m glad.

I love my family. On the way up here, my mom bought me a football helmet at a thrift store for three bucks (despite me being 50 years old and no longer a child), just because she knew it would make me happy. My dad took me shooting and we had real conversations about how imperfect things are. We’re not shellacking our hair, shopping for quarter-zips, and trying to be family influencers. We’re in the trenches together, trying to figure it out.

As Christians in families we talk, we pray, we lament, and we give thanks. Sometimes we cloister in little groups and laugh. Sometimes we escape to the basement to “work” (read: get away from everybody). Sometimes we long to be back together with our church family.

But we keep going.