Bio Family - Bill White

Honor your father and mother. - Exodus 20:12

Honor your father and mother. - Ephesians 6:2

Churches love to talk about family: about raising kids, about honoring parents, about healthy marriages. There’s a certain inevitability about it, to some degree. All of us have biological parents, after all. We all came from somewhere, even if that story is complicated.

As we think about biological family, how do we critique some of the unhealthy ways that we’ve been taught to honor family while still showing honor to our family? How do we name the family secrets that have kept us bound and shamed, often for decades, while still holding on to gratitude for a million small graces (like all those breakfasts in second grade that were provided us…)? How do we set boundaries with family while still building connection?

Needless to say, this would be a long devotional if we were to try to figure all of that out. But at least we can name it. We can acknowledge that our biological family, no matter how loving, has some issues. And we can acknowledge (I hope) that our biological family, no matter how many issues, had some love.

Perhaps there is an invitation here to just a bit more honesty and a bit more generosity. The honesty would be naming both sides of the equation - the difficulties and the blessings. The generosity would be extending grace - you could call it honor - to our biological family, regardless of the measure and mix of the difficulties and the blessings. Only you, with the Spirit, can determine healthy and hopeful ways of honoring - for some it may be done at a distance, for some it may mean getting up close. One way or the other, spend some time now at least praying for your biological family.