The Dithering of a District Diva

If you’ve never seen the T.V. gameshow “Family Fued,” its title may mislead you. It is not a reality show wherein families argue and publicly air their dirty laundry. Instead, a family — a team of all sorts of blood relatives —  pool their knowledge in order to guess the most popular answers to survey questions, thereby gaining more points than the opposing family team does.

Inside the circle of the family team, there is support, there is encouragement. Everyone rallies behind the chosen family spokesperson, and shares their wisdom with her, because they know that if she wins, they all win.

And so it is in life. Family will always be there for you, always support you, and always give you their best.  Family provides a sense of security, a sense of identity rooted in family history and tradition, a dependable network that will continue from generation to generation to generation — or so we’re told.

Some families are fortunate to have that kind of network in both their immediate and extended families. Others are not.  So what happens when you don’t get the love, the support, the courtesy, the safe-haven and the care you feel you should get from family? You get another kind of Family Feud.  There is bitterness, anger, hatred that is stored up and snowballing inside of you, year by year by year until it explodes and you self-destruct. That can’t possibly be the kind of life God intended for us to have on earth.

I’ve been sharing the revelation I received on my 25th birthday with pretty much anyone who will listen, though I sometimes forget to apply it myself. The revelation is that the key to freedom is understanding that my life’s purpose is to give God glory and to please Him.  If everything I do is for Christ and to make Him happy, then it doesn’t matter if people appreciate it or reciprocate, because ultimately, my actions weren’t for them, anyway, though they got to be the beneficiaries.  Needing no validation or acceptance from people because one is completely fulfilled with God’s validation and acceptance is truly liberating — and an extremely difficult end to reach.

It is so much easier to let go of anger with strangers like Deborrah Cooper who I really can’t feel betrayed by when they set off attacks against the Black community. Who am I to her? She doesn’t know me; she shouldn’t feel obligated to me.

It’s a much more difficult pill to swallow with family because you expect them to feel obligated to treat you right and you expect for promises to be honored and for them to be dependable. But just as God has no respect of persons, we aren’t supposed to, either. Our “family” is every child of God. If so, then family shouldn’t be treated any more special than anyone else on the earth, because we aren’t showing kindness and love to people because “they’re my family,” but because it makes God happy. Therefore, we should have no more expectations of family than anyone else on earth.

Jesus says as much in the book of Mark when he consolidated the Ten Commandments into two:  ^“Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength. The second is this: Love your neighbor as yourself. There is no commandment greater than these.”  Love God with everything within you — live to make Him happy.  Love your neighbor as yourself — your flesh, your blood, your own family.

It’s the complete antithesis of everything we’re socialized to believe and expect from family. Total radical, that Jesus was! But, if we, like Christ, are to get our identity and our comfort and our strength, not from our blood relatives and our close friends, but from God, then this line of thinking makes complete sense. And if we understand that we shouldn’t have these kinds of expectations from family members, then we can’t be hurt by them when they fail to reach those expectations.  And if we’re not hurt by them, how much different would our relationships with our family members be? It’s a convicting thought.

It is also a daily struggle, and I am praying that God revolutionize my thinking, soften my expectations, and bend my heart towards His true freedom: to release every person from the unholy responsibility of validating me.

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