Dsyfunction

Family… We all have them… And they all are different… But what makes family?

 

Some of us have functional families, but I don’t know anyone like that. But I am sure they exist, because they have to in order to have a thing call dysfunctional families. Now that’s the family type I come from, and I am glad!

 

Think about it, a functional family is a family with no problems, every child is perfect and the parents are perfect, even the pet dog is perfect… How mundane a life; me I prefer excitement, non-normal behavior, and a family dog with personality!

 

I  have run across families that seem to be functional on  the outside, and to tell you the truth, I didn’t trust them at first, but once I got to know them, I discovered that they where alright, they too where dysfunctional. So that made it easy to except them.

 

This is all very biblical, we see it through out the Old and New Testament, we as humans are dysfunctional, and so are our families. It starts in the fist book of the bible with Adam and Eve.

 

Adam and Eve where very dysfunctional as a family unit, Eve eats the apple because a snake tells her too, not very normal, talking snakes. Adam eats the apple because his wife tells him to, all because a snake told her to. I don’t know about you, but if my wife, girlfriend, or anyone else told me to eat an apple because a snake told them to, I think I would be thinking it’s time for a doctors visit.

 

Cane and Able, not very functional, one kills the other over an offering. Adam and Eve and the kids all could have been on The Dr. Phil or Jerry Springer show. But that’s how we start off, and it only gets better.

 

Take Noah and his 2 girls, they get him drunk and have sex with him, not what I would call functional. This for the Old Testament can go on and on, and it don’t stop in the Old Testament, the New Testament also have dysfunctional families going on, nothing as dramatic as Noah or Adam and Eve maybe but its still there.

 

The point is not to point out the dysfunctional families in the bible, but rather to point out that I really don’t think there is such a thing as a functional family. I would argue that the typical dysfunctional family is really a functional family.

 

Noah’s family was saved because they where just and good, God saved them and all the animals. We would not call what his daughters did as just or good. Yes it was after the fact that this happened, but God knows what is on our hearts and minds, and there is no past or future with God, time does not exist with God. So He must have know what was going to happen, or at least the possibility of it happening , because we do have free will, so they could have chosen different paths. But that is a completely different blog.

 

Back to Noah, so God chose a family that was just and good, yet they still where dysfunctional. Kind of gives you a little hope don’t it? If God can call then just and good, then maybe my family still has a shot.

 

So yah, I will take my dysfunctional family any day, in-fact I thank God everyday for them. I, by no means, am any less dysfunctional then the rest of my family, but I like to think that I learn to live my life a little bit better, by observing the dysfunctions of the rest of my family. Maybe grow a little bit closer to God because of it.

 

It seemed to work for Adam and Eve, sure they where thrown out of the garden for ever, but something happened at that point in history. We where able to learn to grow in our love for God, and God showed us his love for us, by sending his son to save us. So through the dysfunction of Adam and Eve, we got to experience the love of God through the passion, death and resurrection of our Lord Jesus the Christ!

 

So a little dysfunction can go a long way!

 

Paul