On the Importance of Church Family

My church has a custom, on the second Sunday of every month, of calling everyone who has a birthday or anniversary during that month to come to the altar rail and receive a blessing. Birthdays go on one side of the altar, anniversaries on the other. Since my birthday falls in August, this past Sunday I went up and knelt with the other August birthday-ers – and, as it happened, on my left was a young girl of sixteen, and on my right, a mature woman in her sixties, both of whom I consider friends.

After we received our blessing, I went back to my pew, and watched as the priest blessed the anniversary couples. As usual, he asked how many years of marriage each couple was celebrating, and repeated the number for the congregation to hear: this month we had celebrations of 20, 55, and 65 years. (We applauded.)

I got to thinking: where else do we get this kind of example? Where else do we see teenagers, adults, and the elderly all together for the same reason? Where else do we see single people and married couples, those with wiggly toddlers, with grown-up children, and those without children, all spending time together? People who are part of a large extended family – and who live in the same area as that family – get this experience as a natural part of their life, but I suspect that’s increasingly rare these days.

As a military kid, I lived in half a dozen different states before high school, and college brought more moves, more distance from the roots that for me had never sunk very deep anyway. All of my grandparents had passed away by the time I was in my 20s, and I had never really gotten to know my aunts and uncles and cousins. The result was that until I became a Christian, and perforce began attending church, I had spent most of my life interacting almost exclusively with people of my own age group – with all the lack of depth that entails.

Trust me, there are life questions for which the advice of someone older and wiser than yourself is exceedingly helpful.

In our culture, we are age-segregated in school; in college we continue to hang out with people our own age; after graduation, social clubs and activities tend to fall along age lines as well. Teens don’t hang out with thirtysomethings; retired and working people have different schedules, different interests. People with children gather with others who have children their own age. It’s all very natural, in a way, but it also means that we tend to congregate with those who have no more experience than we do on the big questions in life. In short, we lack perspective and wisdom.

So much of the time we get our ideas about life from all the wrong places: looking to the media and the news to show us how to have relationships, what marriage is, how to grow old, what it looks like to handle misfortune and suffering with patience and grace, how to love each other. Too often the message we get is either of false romanticism or false despair: that everything will be perfect all the time, and that if it’s not perfect, we should just give up and move on.

Seeing the real example of men and women living out the life of Christ, in real time, gives me hope. My brothers and sisters in Christ help me be more realistic; life will continue to be a challenge even when I have a success or an important milestone of achievement. And they help me to have hope, and to rejoice: because I can see what it looks like to live out this Christian life, one step at a time – and take that step.

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