Relationships are Messy

Today is my youngest son’s birthday. He is 15 today. I am really not sure how he got so old. I can remember his birth and the months nursing him so clearly - like it was yesterday. The years go fast, although it never seems that way when it is 3:00 in the morning and your toddler wants to play. Parenting isn’t always easier because my cubs are older though. As they grow, their struggles do too.

I’ve been thinking a lot about relationships lately - the ways we change and they ways we stay the same. I’ve been pondering my little family - the boys and me (and of course, Castiel - can’t leave out the fluffy one among us.). I’ve been thinking about the ways we have learned to communicate and hold space for each other in our emotional healing, and the way we love one another in our victories and our mistakes. We are not who we were 4 years ago and that is a good and healthy thing.

I’ve also been thinking about my larger family - my parents, my siblings and their spouses, my nieces and nephews. We are a big, noisy, chaotic bunch when we get together - laughing loudly and carrying on, talking over one another and arguing about theology and politics. It is beautiful and overwhelming all at the same time.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the way my family has been showing up for me over and over, especially since I became a widow. I was pretty isolated from them for a lot of years. We would see each other some, but there wasn’t the closeness I wished for.

After my husband died though, my family surrounded me despite the distance. My parents basically lived with the boys and me for months. My father literally held me up at the funeral home as I made arrangements. My mom and dad sat with me while I cried and while I was numb. They reminded me to eat, and they helped me pack to move closer to home. My siblings have loved me hard and have become safe places and cheerleaders and confidants again. My family held me and my boys together, even though the long isolation had stunted our relationships for a time. These wonderful people have been a safe container for our grief and pain, and they have been our encouragers as we found our voices and tried new things. They have been literal grace and hope to us.

Relationships are hard work. They are messy and imperfect. Let’s just be honest and name that.

It is so easy for us to choose safety and armor right now. Our country is deeply divided, and recent events have only made that more evident. We tend to circle the wagons with people who look like us and think like us and vote like us. Sometimes our relationships become an echo chamber where everyone we know sounds like us.

But I believe God created us to live in authentic community - the messy kind. We need to get better at hearing one another and listening to understand, not to find the weakness and attack. We are never going to agree on everything. But here is the bottom line: We need each other even when we annoy each other. There are things in this life that we cannot do alone.

Brene Brown often talks about how hard it is to hate somebody up close. That up close part is hard though. We need both courage and vulnerability to get there and to find true belonging. We learn to love and honor our own stories so that we can learn empathy and grace for someone else’s story. Our journey is to listen more than speak, to hear one another’s stories and find commonality. Our journey is to move in close and choose hard conversations and persist through the messy parts.

I will be eternally grateful for the ways my family closed ranks around me and my boys. They moved in close and persisted through some really hard conversations and messy parts. I needed them. I still need them. They are my people. They have been Christ to me in my most needy hours.

I know you have people too. It may be your blood family. Maybe your friends and chosen family are your anchor. Whoever they are, love them hard. Be brave and let them see your true and messy self. Tell them how much you love and need them. Invest in your people and let them invest in you too.

When we live in community, we are better than we would be alone. Yes, it’s hard. Yes, we hurt one another sometimes. But when we choose to love each other over and over, not just in spite of our quirks and faults, but because of them, we better represent the goodness and steadfast love that God has for us.

And Rickleses, I love you, and I am grateful for you every single day.

So tell me, who are your people? What do you love most about them? How have you persisted through the messy parts? How do you reflect grace to one another?