Family

When we think of the family we long for, we imagine love, faithfulness, truthfulness, forgiveness, security in our value and worth, and lasting identification of ourselves with one another. It's the ongoing-ness of relationships that daily binds us together, not static imprisonment in one another's opinions. Unless we hold fast to an exemplar of Love external to our selves and community, the risk of subjugating our relationships with one another to our own agendas, ideas, and personal judgments grows over time. Perhaps family is as much journey as life is. I came across a quote of Mikhail Bakhtin, the literary critic, which seems to warn of our fragility and vulnerability:
"The very being of man...is deepest communion. To be means to communicate. Absolute death (non-being) is the state of being unheard, unrecognized, unremembered. To be means to be for another, and through the other, for oneself. A person has no internal sovereignty, he is wholly and always on the boundary; looking inside of himself, he looks into the eyes of another or with the eyes of another."
May we see one another with the eyes of the God who loves us, today.