My Place in the Family

In the last three weeks, I’ve driven over three thousand miles.  I am tired just writing that sentence. Beyond the fatigue, my mind wonders…  These experiences felt connected, somehow.  What was God trying to teach me?  And, what did it all mean?

My husband and I made the long trip to Washington DC, where a member of ‘my Tennessee family’ was ordained a Dominican Priest.  We felt so blessed to be a part that experience.

Just imagine sitting in the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception watching as Cardinal Timothy Dolan celebrates the mass and says the prayer of ordination over the kid who used to sit at your piano and play the Peanuts theme song on a continuous loop for what seemed like hours, until you’d lose it and scream, “I know you know another song…any song.”

Seriously, it was a beautiful celebration and after the mass the newly ordained Father Peter gave his first blessing to his parents.  What a gift it was for my family,  that we are given the opportunity to accompany this family on this and many other parts of their journey.

I rested for a few days after we got home.  Then I loaded up again and took my daughter’s fifty pound, treeing Walker coonhound on an eight hundred mile trek to her new home in Austin Texas.

This was my daughter’s first job post college.  It was a big change  from her long career as a college student (phD) to that of a full fledged, completely independent adult.  And, while I trust that she could have done this entirely on her own, It felt right that I would be there to accompany her during this transition.

I left Austin and drove to Dallas to visit with a cousin.  She has had a great deal of loss in the last few years.  I knew that there was nothing that I could do or say to make her sadness any less.  But, maybe if I accompany her, just for a while, in the midst of her grief, she will not feel so alone.

The first day home from Texas, I found out that my brother-in-law had gone into the hospital in a town close to where I live.  So for the next few days, I’d go to the hospital and spend an hour here or there to help them pass the time.  I was just seven years old when they married so he seems more like a brother.  It felt good to have the gift of time to accompany them during his hospital stay.

I hear a lot of parents worry about their adult children.  It is difficult to know what to do and where the boundaries are when they make decisions that you don’t agree with. Perhaps I will remember that if I accompany them in love, healing will begin because God is love.

One of the gifts of my twelve-step recovery program is to learn what my place is as a family member.  I can’t run in and fix much of anything.  I can’t save the world.  Those are the jobs of God.  What I can do is be there to see them and hear them.  I can let them know how loved they are.

I think that is what Jesus does for me and you.  Maybe that is what I was to learn from these last few weeks.

“Though we are many, we are one body…”