There’s nothing like a Thanksgiving get together to remind you that a functional family just doesn’t exist. You get together with your family under the theme of “appreciation and gratefulness” for all the things God has blessed you with and you end up walking away saying, “Man, my family is crazy.” Then you visit your spouse’s family and you both realize the same thing. Finally, you talk with your friends about their family and they are all saying the same thing.

I guess it’s all “relative” though (NPI). Growing up, my neighbor’s dad was an alchoholic that demanded athletic perfection from him. His parents ended up getting a divorce. As we sat out in the street and talked, he would talk about how much he hated his dad and always refered to my family as the Huxtables - the 80s equivalent of the Cleaver family. (Don’t get me wrong. For the most part my family is great, but I just want to make the point that no family is perfect.)

While maybe nothing nearly as painful as my neighbor’s experience has happened to you or your family, there are things that have happened in the past, maybe many generations ago, that still have an effect on you today. It’s effected your parents, it has effected you, and it will effect how you raise and treat your children. Just think … the past experiences of relatives you never knew somehow end up shaping how you view and deal with life. This leads me to an interesting thought. Thank God for the idea of “opposites attract” because while on a micro-level it might make marriage difficult, on a macro-level it helps balance things out in the gene pool of human life.