In The Beginning God Created Family

In the Beginning God Created Family

My child, listen when your father corrects you. Don’t neglect your mother’s instruction.

Proverbs 1:8

For more than five decades a thousand people wrote to her every day—before the age of e-mail. She had eight secretaries and two clerks who would winnow the letters down to about two hundred and then sort those into categories. Each letter told a story and then asked a question of a woman who had spent her life dispensing advice to the lovelorn, the afflicted, the battered, the diseased, the lonely, and the confused. Her name was Ann Landers.

“The changes I have seen,” she once wrote, “would twirl your turban.” Over the years her advice shifted from bad breath to AIDS, from spoiled brats to gun-toting ten-year-olds. Despite the changes, Ann Landers stated that the number-one issue people have questions about is families. “It’s always been that way,” she says, “and I suspect it’s always going to be that way.”^a

How could it be otherwise? It is within the family that our personhood, our very identity, first takes shape. Our family provides us with a blueprint for ways of being and behaving. We pick up on rules, regulations, and expectations about our own and other people’s behavior from our family. It is in the family that we learn about what kinds of feelings are acceptable, appropriate, and tolerable. Every conceivable subject is taught in the family, from politics to religion, from psychology to philosophy. And, of course, Christianity. John Wesley once said, “I learned more about Christianity from my mother than from all the theologians of England.” Lessons are learned at home more quickly than any university professor could ever hope for in a classroom. It is within family that life’s lessons are internalized and become the substrate from which our thinking, our motives, our very personalities are formed.

It’s no wonder that God designed human beings to live in families. Throughout human history, the family has fulfilled God’s intent to provide a context for creation and care. Charles Colson wrote, “The family, ordained of God as the basic unit of human organization, is necessary not only for propagating the race but as the first school of human instruction.”^b Colson couldn’t be more right. We learn almost everything from our families. That’s the way God made it. So what life lessons did your family teach you? What life lessons are you as a couple passing on?

Call it a clan, call it a network, call it a tribe, call it a family. Whatever you call it, whoever you are, you need one.

—Jane Howard

^a 140

^b 141