Family relationships, for most of us, will be some of the deepest connections we have with other humans. The pull of a Mother’s love, the alliance between brothers, the understanding of sisters. In some families, these connections anchor our lives, in others, these are the ties that bind and strangle. Most of us experience some of both, often simultaneously. 

Family happens inside, behind the doors of our homes. The rules change when we crowd through the door. Feet go up and hair comes down. Voices raise, scores get settled, records are set straight. To be known, to be torn limb from limb by siblings, all happens at home, where the emotions of belonging are freedom, security, a sense of being seen and still loved.

Often though, home is where is where we have been hurt. Home is where the gloves come off. Home is where we stifle, injure and wound others, in part because it is so easily done. Strangers may throw sticks and stones, but those who are closest deliver the fatal knife wounds. Our pulsing vitals are always within reach of each other. 

Our dysfunctions usually age and mature with us. Grown children whine for their pacifiers. Feeble parents reach for their switches. Big brothers still bully their kid brothers who now outweigh them. The lines between loving care and crippling enablement, between support and dependency, are often erased or blurred.

And then we meet Jesus. We bow the knee, go under the water and confess to all the world we are no longer our own. We have joined hands with a larger family now. But when we get home sometimes it feels like the seats at the table are all taken. Maybe it’s not the best place for Him, with everything that goes on, you know, with Dad, or the oldest boy. These complex relational dramas feel exempt somehow. Jesus is more for the streets and highways. Because we already are a Christian family. Because we love each other already here at home, even when it’s a little weird. So it’s fine.

But Jesus wanders through our hearts like a curious cousin. He finds the locked doors, the old wounds, the red streaks running up our arms. What’s this? He asks. What happened here?

I am part of three families, all of which, like all families, have complicated histories. I sit in our living rooms with siblings and parents and wife and children and talk of weather and neighbors while the air is full of things that have formed us and acted on our very souls for better and worse. Some of these things have been unspoken for too long. Some things are spoken of too often. But because family is different, closer, because that’s how brothers are and sisters talk, we file exemptions. It feels like Jesus should understand and make exceptions for family, because where would you even start? 

Jesus does understand and that’s why He doesn’t make exemptions. We are our best and worst at home, which is who He wants to work with. The real you and me. The home us.

I have asked Jesus to live in my heart, my same heart that’s been shaped by the families I’m part of. Do I bring Him in with me or tell Him to wait outside? Is He someone who, in the living room with my parents, brothers and sisters, helps me be a little kinder, a little more open? More willing to recognize the long years of prayer, labor and love my parents invested in me? More supportive of my brother’s choices, more interested in my sister’s lives, more open to my complicity in the tangled web of memories, resentments, pettiness and sheer childishness that can cobweb the corners of family?

A Jesus who gets left at the door because family is different isn’t of much use, is He?