We are ourselves, even as we live together as a family.

For each other, we make modifications, we make concessions, and we make mistakes. We learn to live as a family even as we all change and become different versions of our same selves. It’s a circling of needs and becoming, taking turns, together and separate. It’s a watching and a participating, a waiting and a racing to catch up. It’s not a seamless thing, or a process that can be qualified, but this is how it is and how we are becoming.

We rest in the nearness of the other while allowing them to change into how they are now in this moment, and then all over again in the next moment, and the next and the next. We might look back, thinking we had it all then and we didn’t even know it. We might look ahead into how we hope it will be. But really the wholeness is here in this next moment allowing our people to be who they are even as they become who they need to be.

It’s a strange dance that looks different to every person involved and no one actually knows the steps.

But we dance nonetheless. Looking and twirling and listening from one beat to the next.

Just wait. We don’t get to know how it turns out, but it is enthralling. One way or another, riveting. We can’t take our eyes off it, but it is so easy to lose sight of.

It’s not a forever stasis, it’s a forever change.

It’s the changing nature of family, and how we seem, and how we form together.

It’s a side-by-side becoming as we all become ourselves –  again and again, and still again.

We shape-shift and they shift. They shape-shift and we shift.  Accommodating and loving as best we can.

In the midst of this messy dance where no-one knows exactly what they are doing (even if they pretend they do) I want to communicate love, well-being, worth and belonging. Though it’s not something I’ve learned to hold in awareness yet, it’s the feeling of what I want for us and for my people.

I want us all to know we are loved, to rest in a sense of well-being that is deeper than our circumstances, to be affirmed and feel relief in a sense of worth, to be confident and at home in our belonging.

Love, wellbeing, worth and belonging.

And when our five senses and our humanity and our loved humans fail us, I also want these feelings to come from our knowledge of who we are in Christ. A well-grounded knowledge that we are loved and worthy, and we can be at peace because we belong. I want my kids to have that. I want my spouse to have that, I want my siblings to have that. I want my friends to have that. I want my extended family to have that. And everyone else.

But every person starts somewhere and my somewhere is here in my home. And here with me. When I am firm in my belovedness as a child of God, I know that Jesus died for me and, even though I am taught to say I am not worthy, God thought, through Jesus, that I am worthy. That gives me that sense of well-being, of reassuring peace and belonging that allows me to extend my love and energy toward my people in hopes that they can feel that too.

Love, wellbeing, worth, belonging.

These are not about circumstances, these just are. No matter how it seems on the outside of our life.

This whole together family thing?This is the why behind it. This is what I want to speak to my people. At the heart, not in all the ways I fail. When I really stop to think about it and what I believe, this is it.

Love, well-being, worth, belonging.

Through Jesus.

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You are loved.

You are ok. You are safe. You are wanted.

You are worthy.

You belong.

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Go from there.

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This month I am joining the #write31days community to explore the idea of the Whole Together Family because I believe we get be who God created us to be – together. Find the whole list posts here or click on the image.