family.relationships

This semester I'm taking a Marriage and the Family class. I don't know yet how pertinent it is to me; it seems that most people are primarily concerned with dating issues, but I think I'll still enjoy it.

Yesterday,  I read the first chapter of the book, The Family: A Christian Perspective on the Contemporary Home by Jack and Judith Balswick. Although it's required reading for the class, I actually really enjoyed it. It was kind of an introduction chapter where they established a theological basis for family relationships. They proposed four essential elements as the foundation: covenant, grace, empowering, and intimacy. As they began to explain how each of these elements work together to create a mature covenant, I realized for the first time how my family is flawed.

All my life, I grew up in a small church where my family was viewed as the "role model family" for all the other, not so Christian families to live up to. Why there is even such pride and competition for being "more Christian than the rest" is beyond me. At the time, it seemed normal, it seemed right, and I enjoyed the attention. "There are the Shearer girls." "Aren't they just the most well-behaved children." "They are so disciplined in their home schooling." "They play piano and violin so beautifully." And we were taught to respond something like this, "Thank you. We strive to use all our talents to glorify God. He gave them to us to bless people." Haughty pride. Were our hearts really right? Were we really about glorifying God? I'm not so sure.

I love my family. They did the best they knew how to raise us. But they aren't perfect, no one is. What I've said and what I'm about to say is by no means to be taken the wrong way. I do not want to criticize or condemn my parents or my church, I'm just sorting out some things in my life based on some new discoveries after reading this book.

I enjoyed being home schooled. I liked being at home. It gave me more time to practice piano and violin. But there are many things about my home school life that not many people know. Family and friends only saw the outcome--the yearly portfolio filled with perfectly perfect examples of a perfect education. The time, the stress, the endless of hours of sleepless nights, the anger, the frustrations--all to create a breathtaking portfolio, to be viewed by as many as possible and labeled "the best." I really had no choice in the matter. I was a child, I wanted to make Mom and Dad happy, and I knew this was one way to do it.

Why is it that my entire life seems to have been a front set up to make me "the perfect example"? No one knows that there wasn't much order to our home schooling, that we were always "catching up" and never on track. They don't know that underneath our "organized" front, our house was always a mess. We rarely had a clean kitchen or clean laundry. We never invited people over for fear they'd find out what our life was really like.

Something happened, slowly at first, which steadily began to strain my family relationships. First it was college. I didn't know how unprepared I was for college until I was there. It took a whole year to begin to adjust and figure out my new life. I was on my own for the first time ever. I didn't know what to do. I wasn't prepared to make my own decisions. I had been very sheltered at home, I didn't know ANYTHING. I began to realize that I needed to start thinking for myself, I needed to know where I stood, not my parents. And I made choices, my own choices for the first time ever.

Then I made a choice that drastically affected my life. I married Wes. All of the sudden, it seemed that I dropped from the "pedestal of perfection" in the eyes of my family and my church. Wes is Baptist and my family goes to an independent Assembly of God church. Obviously, it was a huge deal. But I liked it. For the first time in my life, I no longer felt the need to be perfect. The tension and stress of being perfect and pleasing everyone wasn't worth the attention that I craved.

I am a whole person through Christ, that is all the I need. Ever. And now I am happy to live a carefree life, doing my best for God's glory and not to please other people. Wes has helped so much in this process of reshaping my motives and goals. I don't care anymore what people say about me. I'm not pressured to be perfect, and I'm not perfect. I mess up all the time. But I feel so much more at peace.

I was not always sure exactly what was flawed with my family. Because we were the "model Christian family," I thought for a long time that meant our family was as good as it gets. But after reading this chapter and completely understanding the foundational elements of family relationships, I can now pinpoint the things we've been doing wrong and I want to fix it. And not just that. I'm not going to make the same mistakes with my family in the future.