A Discipleship Moment | December 29, 2024

Jesus, Mary, and Joseph - the perfect family.

Theodore, Hallie, and Aaron - an imperfect family.

What’s the difference?  For starters, our son is not God, I am far from sinless, and Aaron is actually Theodore’s biological father.  But even apart from these obvious examples, we still fall quite short of perfection by way of our very human faults.  We all do.  It turns out that being part of a family is really difficult.

If you were to ring our doorbell and step into the House of Cards on any given day, you would find laundry that needs to be folded, dishes in the sink, toys on the floor, an ADHD six year-old arguing that he doesn’t need to do his homework, and a frustrated mama counting slowly to five… again.  While our house is definitely filled with love, it is also filled with people who make mistakes, say unkind things, overreact to situations, and struggle to understand one another sometimes.  Like I said, human faults.

While a huge part of all family life, these everyday messy bits are not often what people share with the world.  Instead, we clean up the house for company and act on our best behavior when out in public.  On social media, we post pictures of all of the happy things we do and write about the amazing accomplishments we earn.  To the outside world, everything looks impeccable - or pretty darn close, however, there is a rather large danger in this practice, and it comes in the form of comparison.  
It can be hard to see the curated, neat lives of those around us (even if that is not reality for them either) when we are supremely aware of the messy bits in our own.  Goodness knows it is difficult enough to be a parent, a spouse, a sibling, a child, and/or a friend without feeling like you have to be doing it all flawlessly. ​

This is why I love the gospel reading today.  The Holy Family is the very ideal of what we should be, and yet, when Jesus is twelve, Mary and Joseph take Jesus to Jerusalem and are a day’s worth of traveling away before they realize they left him there.  I am not saying Mary and Joseph are bad parents, far from it, but I do appreciate that they were real parents.  Even though we know that they are perfect, we see the messy bit here.  Yes, this is included in the gospel to show Jesus’s relationship to God the Father and his own divine authority, but it does make the human family unit very relatable.  For that, I am grateful.

While it can be hard not to compare ourselves and our home lives to that which we see posted by our friends and relatives on social media, we can look to the Scriptures and see a snapshot of reality from the family who understands what it is like to perfectly love, forgive, support, give mercy, seek understanding, and be present to each other.  All of this serves to inspire, never condemn.  All of the things that the Holy Family does perfectly, we are called to do as well.  While no family will ever live up to the model that they set for us, they show us that, with the grace of the Holy Spirit, it can be done.

Our God loves us so much that he was born into a real family.  Let us welcome him into our own.
~ Hallie