Family Secrets

Family Secrets

Grace, mercy and peace be unto you from God who is Creator, Christ and Comforter.  Amen

I’ve been a Christian nearly all my life.  I accepted Jesus into my life when I was six years old – 50 too many years ago!  Coming from a fundamentalist, holiness background, this first act of salvation is pretty much equivalent to baptism in mainline churches. 

I took this promise seriously.  I remember praying a lot as a child and asking for God to do things for me, with me, through me.  I prayed, as every child does, for good things only to happen to our family.  God blessed us – in many ways – until…

Until my mom’s first mental breakdown and she was diagnosed as manic-depressive (now named bi-polar).  This was the early 70’s and people just didn’t talk about mental illness and its horrible effects on both the patient and their families.  We were shamed into silence and we suffered alone.  I did my very best, at the age of 13, to keep my little sisters from the horrors of this disease…and I failed.  I live with that failure every day. 

I prayed and prayed that God would heal my mom – that she would come out of the first…and the second… and all the subsequent episodes…and this one would be her last one.  When I realized that bi-polar isn’t something people are cured from (even after being prayed over, having hands laid on her, and demons exorcised from her), my prayer changed.  I began to ask why…why her?  Why us?  What did we do to deserve this?  What were we to learn?  I prayed and prayed and prayed. 

And, I kept the family secret of mental illness for years.  And finally, I came to acceptance.  This is who we were. 

I understood Job in ways that lots of my friends did not. 

Job was steadfast in his time of testing.  He stayed true to God and God’s goodness…even in times of suffering.  Job had a deep and abiding relationship in God that kept him grounded.  He believed that God was there with him. 

And, I am sure he was thankful that his friends came and stayed with him.  Their questions and probings probably helped Job stay focused and certain that he had done nothing; his children had done nothing to deserve the calamity and death that befell them.  His friends stayed.  They heard God speaking to Job and their faith in the One True God became more deeply founded in the God who answers. 

How could God allow this to happen?  What did he do to deserve all of those horrible things – loss of camels, and donkeys, and oxen, and sheep and most of all his children?!?! 

We have all had measures of grief and events that are beyond our understanding as to WHY?  Why do bad things happen to good people? 

The answer doesn’t seem to be very satisfying:

·        Because we are human.

·        Because we live in a broken world where human choices affect others beyond our own knowing. 

·        Because we are alive and choose to keep on living. 

·        Because God is God and we are not.

What we experienced today, at the end of this study and the end of the Book of Job, is the blessings that were returned to Job because of his steadfast and unwavering faith in God.  He was given double what he had in the beginning of all his livestock.  His family (his sisters and brothers) relationships were restored and he had 10 more children – perfect numbers again – 7 sons and 3 daughters, who are given an inheritance along with their brothers – something very rare in Job’s day. 

And, we know his daughter's names: Jemimah, whose name means either “daylight” or “dove” being very hard to translate into English; and Keziah, whose name means either “fragrance of the flower” or “cinnamon;”  and Keren-happuch, whose name means “horn of antimony” (a black substance women used in the East to enhance their eyes – much like kohl was used in Egypt).  Beautiful women whose names reflect their beauty. 

Job lived a full life – 140 years – and saw his great-grandchildren.  “And Job died, old and full of days.”  Poor Mrs. Job (who is nameless), who had to give birth to 10 more children probably in middle age!!!

Do you wonder if Job ever told the story to his family of the tremendous testing that he went through?  Do you think he remembered his first 10 children and their names and said them often enough that his second 10 children knew their siblings well? Did they come to accept the history of their family as: this is who we are. 

Or was it a family secret that everybody knew? 

Frederick Buechner wrote a book entitled Telling Secrets that was transformative for me and my own family secrets.  His father committed suicide – a great family secret that everybody knew.  As he dealt with this truth, and his other family secrets, he came to his understanding: “When they are sad and hurtful secrets, like my father’s death, we can in a way honor the hurt by letting ourselves feel it as we never let ourselves feel it before, and then, having felt it, by laying it aside; we can start to take care of ourselves the way we take care of people we love. To love our neighbors as we love ourselves means also to love ourselves as we love our neighbors. It means to treat ourselves with as much kindness and understanding as we would the person next door who is in trouble. Little by little then we begin to be able to look at each others faces, and at our own faces in the mirror, without the intervening shadows that unaired secrets cast.”

Isn’t it amazing for us to know that all of our secrets are held in the loving hands of Jesus…who knows their sacredness…and who died for us-and our secrets…so that their stronghold on us can be loosened forever? 

Thanks be to God!!!

In the name of the Father and of the Son + and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen