Tough Love. Wow, Isn’t That Tough?

I have come to realize that family is one of the most important gifts we have now and will, for most of our lives, have. The thing is when you are around them, you do not see to appreciate them the way you are supposed to until you come to a point where you don’t have them at arm’s length. When they are around us, their wanting to know and suggest and direct almost seems like the total loss of our privacy and our independence. Until you are away from them and come to realize that all those “in our business stuff” rolled into one word is called love. So maybe we should try to appreciate family a lot more than we sometimes care to do.

Family is important to God. He created it before He created the church and, as with each of His creations, He made a plan for it to succeed. At the heart of that plan is love. To be part of a family is to be loved. Many times, what happens is that the love that we receive from our family doesn’t seem like what we would have expected, but Honey, that’s Tough Love and sometimes tough love is all we need. We need tough love to realize that we are supposed to feel uncomfortable in the place where we are. We need tough love to determine to go through that storm that is marked out for us on our way to that place where we have to be.

We need tough love to want nothing else except to press on painfully toward that goal, take hold of it, and finally put everyone to shame and get all the bunch of them off of our backs! The truth is when you have finally succeeded, the best people you would want to celebrate with is your family and in the end, we never get any farther away from them than we were in the beginning. Because God never put them in our lives so that we could live our lives without them but we were created as a family to need and want one another.

Family is hard work.I mean isn’t it hard work to love so fiercely in order to sometimes have to seemingly be the worst enemy of the one you love? And isn’t it equally as hard to go through a season of tears caused by the ones who make you laugh? It is hard work.

I am, in no way, referring to abusive families or friends. If your family is abusing you, I suggest that you get help because in a case like this one, your family will also need the help. Abuse is never one of the functions of the family.

After all is said and done, we should know that our God looks forward to the greatest family reunion of all time, stretching across all of eternity. So are you going to be there? And what about your family?