Jesus says who is my mother

I said the prayer every time I saw it, just in case. Ironically, those of us in that movement really thought we got it, thought that we more than anyone understood the gospel and all of its implications. The one comfort was that as far as I knew, those who left did so by choice, not by force. This proved to be the case with my biological family, too. Shortly after the eighties began, my father left us for good, returning to Pennsylvania without a California testimony. The final nail in the coffin of idealized seventies Christianity, for me, came in the summer of A news report came on: Christian singer Keith Green—who I idolized, and had seen in concert—two of his children, and nine other people had died in a small-plane crash while Green was showing off his Last Days Ministries property.

Where did that leave us? In the suburbs, eventually, where we moved when my mother remarried. We still attended and participated in my childhood church, but it was different. With people moving out of the city and having kids and real jobs and real money and real mid-life crises, home gatherings were no longer so convenient.

Efforts were made. It was just that other things were now allowed to get in the way. And, as it turned out, you could fight with your church family as readily as with your biological family.

It was frighteningly easy, in fact, to lose touch with anyone you wanted to lose touch with, or anyone who wanted to lose touch with you. Minor or major doctrinal differences, arguments over whether or not to invest in new chairs or hymnals, the content of Sunday school curriculum, plain boredom…anything could be an excuse to leave if that was what one wanted. Some wanted to prolong and duplicate past experiences; others wanted to get out and start fresh somewhere else.

Those of us who stayed became more protective of ourselves and our stories. I grew up loving and believing in the church as much as I believed in God, maybe more.

My experience of a particular expression of Christianity had come to replace faith. In the scene in Matthew where Jesus tells the crowd who his real family is, maybe we had focused on the wrong part of the story. Especially in the seventies, it fit in with the ideals of peace, love, and understanding. Doing the will of the father was the part we perhaps paid less attention to. Though the creation of an idealized, utopian society based on two verses in the book of Acts is probably just another way to deny that we need grace every second in order to be at all Christlike, I still tend to gravitate toward churches that attempt to act like families.

It would be easier, honestly, not to. Because once you find your congregation and commit and make this public claim of family, and moreover once you start living like you believe what it says in the Bible about unity and the body of Christ, you open your life in every way to exactly the kind of pain and grief and frustration and inconvenience that we all spend so much time trying to avoid. Why would I seek that, rather than simply slipping into a different church each Sunday, no one knowing my name or my life story?

My father died at Thanksgiving, , alone, still alienated from family—biological or otherwise. Within hours, members of my church—a Presbyterian church in Salt Lake City, years and miles and cultures away from the Bible church of my childhood—turned up with flowers, urns of coffee, cookies. Jesus is clear that following Him will cause serious divisions within families.

In Mark —13 He says, "And brother will deliver brother over to death, and the father his child, and children will rise against parents and have them put to death. And you will be hated by all for my name's sake. And a person's enemies will be those of his own household. Jesus' point is challenging, but crucial. Many Christians must choose between following Jesus and maintaining peace in their family. I need His help to open my eyes. May I not judge ones needs, but accept and help. These words of Jesus are why we call other Christians our "brothers-in-Christ" or "sisters-in-Christ.

One family is not more important than another family. They are equal. Not only am I brothers and sisters in Christ, but I am a child of God. God, the Father, who has inherited us all, is the one who gives us the relationship of brothers and sisters. That is why we say "in Christ. We cannot pick and choose our natural family any more than we can pick and choose our spiritual family.

God is the one that chooses them. I should respect what Christ chooses and work on those relationships, rather than to throw them away and seek for something that may be better in my own mind. This would be thinking that I know better than God knows. God gave these people and relationships to me and I treasure His gift.