So, you know how it says, “How can you say that you love God, whom you can not see when you don’t love the one next to you?” (paraphrase). Similarly, the reception of grace: be careful that your reception of grace from your heavenly Father is not just theological (meaning philosophical or even theoretical), but be ready to ask yourself, “what has been your experience of receiving grace horizontally?” It really puts flesh and bones on the experience of grace that ‘merely’ vertical reception of grace can’t, and family, day-to-day, is where this happens.

I think this is exactly where contemporary attempts at “family ministry” miss it. There is so much time and effort put into turning the family into an ongoing classroom to stuff information into children, little is done to help families realize that the can be a “microcosm of our relationship with God.” While, yes, it is important to encourage parents to pass faith on to their children, it is more effectively done by helping families enter into the Story and journey together rather than prescribing how families pass on Biblical information. I’ll have to check out this chapter sometime.

Sometimes relationships with family mediate God to us through negative experiences. For me, what I have lacked in my own family, I’ve found in God. No one, is as precious to me as God. When a healthy relationship with my father was lacking, God became Father for me. In him, I find the unconditional love and grace that I have not always felt from my own family.

Yes. Where else is life lived more than at home with family? This is where spiritual or Christian formation must indeed take place, and what we say doesn’t matter at all; it’s what we do and how we live, and then if we’re beginning to get that right, our words will matter for good.
Good thoughts here, and we must not give up, either. Remember the prodigal son and prodigal father.

i think family is the smallest faith community–the place we may first learn of faith. we bring our family and family system baggage into church. our families are often crucibles in which faith is fired and we are refined. Marriage has taught me a lot about being in community and about learning how to listen, respect, care without enabling, essentially love well.