Jarring is the truth that beside the unconditional love of folk - epitomised by the glorious extended family function - there are fleeting moments, intense, but without the thing to say or do. Love comes so strong 'the right thing' escapes the instant.
A theory we'd like to complete in practice is unfeasible - to know what to be, do or say at the just the time it's needed.
Life like this, to use a Winston Churchill-ism, is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.
Incomplete Times Abound
How is it that we're made perfect in God - due the Saviour's work venturing upon the cross - and yet there is the indelible etch of imperfection over the closest signs all around us.
There is so much imperfection in life; when we're not careful, sweeping is the broom to the depressive episode. That thought is enough to scare us.
The only thing that being saved in God gives us in this way - a critically important thing - is knowledge that imperfection is the point to life. It highlights all the more the gap regarding imperfection and perfection between this life and eternity.
Elusive Qualities Between our Moral Best and Reality
The extended family occasion, one faltering, is a perfect illustration... and faltering only by virtue of the fact that broken human beings make up families, added to the ever-forward, 'take-no-prisoners' movement of time. We can't achieve perfect rapport in the family for long - it's forever elusive. Dynamics are just one thing to order... yet, there is so much more to factor in (personalities, time, initiative, courage to name just four).
Our want of the perfection of love within family is absolutely reasonable; indeed, further, it is honourable and noble that we'd want that.
The gap thereby widens; it has to.
As we ponder our times with the extended family, we can just thank God for them, for the simplicity of knowing them and doing our best whilst accepting their best - all within the constraints of a common human burden.
The want of a complete time, every time within this context is both reasonable and unattainable. Again, it signals to us the realm-wise difference between a physical life here and a spiritual life in eternity.
Cherish Family
All the more we can see why loving family - with all our various imperfections demonstratively foisted - is going to be a flawlessly incomplete thing.
All the more are we to cherish our families. At each occasion we're history-makers and that of itself is not an easy idea to comprehend. It brings with it its own pressures.
Grace is known all the more when we consider how difficult it may be for any member of the family to achieve the simplest of things. We're so different, yet the same flesh and blood. That has to stand for something; but not perfection.
Family must begin to comprehend how hard life can be for the other. In this we can cherish our families, for each must work out their incomplete life, often to unfair standards more readily added to perfection.
Copyright (c) 2011 S. J. Wickham.
Acknowledgement: to Linkin Park's In The End (2001) song. The graphic is from their video clip to the song.
Steve Wickham is a Registered Safety Practitioner (BSc, FSIA, RSP[Australia]) and a qualified, unordained Christian minister (GradDipBib&Min). His blogs are at: http://epitemnein-epitomic.blogspot.com/ and http://inspiringbetterlife.blogspot.com/
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