I think our family is about to embark on a new adventure. It’s not like we’ve never attempted this before and to most people looking at us, they’d probably say we’ve already arrived at this place. In fact, I might even have been a little smug, thinking we were at a point of unity that many families never attain.
But—surprise, surprise—the Holy Spirit has a way of keeping our testimony authentic. He wouldn’t allow me to ignore the evidences of disunity that showed up when we were together, such as certain body language, a sigh, a little sarcasm, sometimes outright confrontations (imagine that, with six alpha males in the same room😉). I’ve had a few flashbacks to days when the boys were all at home, working through their pecking order while listening to our admonishments to be one another’s advocates, reminding them they were best friends for life.
With this backdrop, Pops and I recently began co-hosting, with our youngest son and his wife, a group of young married couples and discussing a book entitled The Blessings of Unity. Since we were the experts on marriage (after 49 years), I expected this study to be a refresher course on principles we think we’ve mastered, and in the beginning it was. At least it was when we were discussing unity between a husband and wife.
However, when the time came to make some hard decisions regarding our property and family finances, we realized our challenge was to make unity work with opinionated adults who happened to belong to the same family.
One afternoon about two months ago we called for a family summit with our five sons. In preparation for it, I randomly pulled out a journal I had written in seven years ago and I came across these words:
March 28, 2011
“Burt and I want to make wise financial decisions that will bless our family for generations and will cause our family to be a blessing to this area as well as to any other people the Holy Spirit sends our way.”
And a month later I wrote,
“God won’t allow us to walk away from challenges to our unity.”
When I read these two journal entries I realized this is a spiritual principle God has been disciplining us in for several years. Like it or not, our family is in the situation room together. We all get out or we all get blown up.
Overall, the boys accepted this as our modus operandi going forward. We would each seek to hear what the Spirit is saying and not move forward until we all hear the same thing. The decisions regarding family business are not finalized yet, but everyone agreed on one thing:
We have to learn to operate in unity so we can prove to anyone watching that it can be done. The breaking down of family relationships and separation between parents, children, and siblings is epidemic. I don’t believe the Lord is going to let us move forward with our individual endeavors unless we as a family are unified.
We’re bound to have hurdles, but we all have a sense of holy challenge. We CAN do this thing. And as we work through some of the sticking points and overcome our temptation to give up and walk away from each other, I hope we’ll learn the lessons God wants to teach us, and I hope we’ll be able to show anyone watching that IT CAN BE DONE. Our sons even went a step further. They agreed since this is what the Lord is teaching us, it will be the thing that needs to be shared with others.
It might be the subject of my next book…