Bloodline | Previous Challenge Entry

how it works

TITLE: Bloodline | Previous Challenge Entry
By Jude Harris
02/22/18
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Say the word "relatives" and many of us give a little pregnant chuckle, thinking of mom's free guilt trips or of our uncle's corny jokes. We have a playful tolerance of relatives because they're family and we're connected. It's that thick blood coursing through our veins that weaves our shared genetics and propensities, creating a familiarity and comfort with each other, even if just meeting for the first time. This shared blood is our family body.

We are so connected, so glued together, that family weddings, funerals, and births are "ours" and much like experiencing something in your own physical body, we also experience these events in our family body. When these events happen outside the family, we show support for others because this belongs to their family, not ours. This is not a reflection of a flawed empathy for others, rather a matter of a personal experience in one's body, physical or family. Belonging to each other by sharing the same bloodline is a very real phenomenon.

So, any separation in a family by time, miles, or estrangement, leaves us incomplete. Think of how often we reconnect with family and how unsettled we feel when things "aren't right" with family relationships. Yet, families are notorious for difficult relationships and unfortunately popular culture today promotes cutting off those "difficult" people in your life and moving on. But if the "difficult" person we are cutting off is a family member, it can be a handicap. Just like in the physical body, severing a limb is only a last resort and not the ideal; no matter how sophisticated the prosthesis, we are still missing a limb. Even with family abuse, "disease" is best when expertly treated, within obvious safe boundaries, keeping the family body intact rather than resorting to an amputation.

As if family ties aren't interesting enough, God throws in another type of bond: friendship, and the ultimate friendship, marriage. This union brings new blood (differences) loaded with essential benefits to the family tree, making it heartier, more durable and producing a more desirable fruit - think inbreeding! Popular jokes about in-laws reflect how rarely we embrace these differences. But marriage and procreation were created to keep the family going, and it is in our best interest to be nurturing and encouraging for a strong healthy bloodline to continue.

Yet many families continue to struggle, threatened by differences. I like to think God knew we were a stubborn lot, so he gave us babies. A baby is an enchanting blend of the two bloodlines, carrying the one family's red, curly hair, and the other family's blue eyes. This, little sweetheart, our mediator, and go-between, captures the hearts of both families, uniting us in love, helping to bridge the gaps between us.

But there is another family we belong to, God's family. God has opened his arms and invited us all to join Him. With Christ's blood, he has made us His, and with a magical new birth, we were born into the family of God. With Christ as our head, we are now His body of believers, joined together by the same blood, giving us a familiarity and comfort with each other. What a mystery! What a righteous family we now belong to! We have brothers and sisters all over the world, blood relatives! And in this family, this bloodline, nothing can separate us from our Father's love, because He never leaves us. We have the greatest, and the most wonderful, Dad in the universe!

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