"family" and family

senior banquet was a blessing from God. so many people serving and helping out, together as a body of Christ, appreciating and admiring at the work of Christ in the seniors' lives. again and again, the theme of treasuring the moments, taking what we learn from kcm back to our church, get plugged into a church and love the church, care for the church and serve the church.

what touched me the most was narrwe speaking for narrae. the whole speech was very touching because how often do you see siblings speaking for each other, expressing gratitude and love towards each other in words, especially in front of other people. i know for me personally, i wish that my brother would somehow do the same for me in the future. but as i keep thinking about it, we always stress about loving our church, caring and serving our church, what about our family? technically, isnt our family part of our church as well? are we, then, loving, caring and serving our family?

looking around, i see lots of brothers and sisters always encouraging and inspiring to love the church, but honestly, i dont see as many who preaches loving our family. have you heard a typical conversation of a college students talking to his/her parents? "mom, come pick me up." "why dont you get it? im so busy." "can you just try to understand me? i have to do this first." "i dont want that, can you just let me choose for once?" in fact, this doesnt limit to college students, but rather this whole generation. if you have seen kids these days, you would be shocked of how some of them treat their parents.

i, too, am one of those who dont preach loving our family, who talk to my parents in those ways. i found myself hiding in fellowship, at church, with people that i like, that i can identify with, as a mean to escape. escape from my problematic family. we can choose friends, but we cant choose family. as imperfect people, there has to be some problems within every single family, whether you admit it or not, and lots of them cannot easily solved. think about it, how much are you spending with you friends? how much time are you spending with your church? how much time you have LEFT for your family? im not saying this is true for everyone, but at least it is true to me and couple others that i have talked to, and i certainly hope that this is not true.

if we say that we should love our church, then our family technically is our church as well for believers. what have we been doing in loving our family? what have we been doing in serving our family? as for non-believers, shouldnt we be witnessing to our family? how can we witness when we dont spend time to love and serve them? when we start having family of our own, our family becomes our primary ministry. if we dont practice loving and serving our family now, how would we be able to do it without much troubles in the future?

something to think about. seriously.