ALL IN THE FAMILY January 27, 2020 It's the Bible study Evangelista show and I’m Sonja Corbitt happy to be with you. I am the Bible study Evangelista. We are in our ‘Then Sings My Soul’ series for 2020. We’re looking at a vision for 2020. What makes our soul sing? What makes our soul sing is proper priorities. And so, we looked, in our first show we looked at how to put God first and making him our top priority. And then we looked at worship and rest as a pair that go together in a Sabbath, or for us as Christians, a Sunday observance. And today we are going to look at vocation. The next call under holiness and under a love for God, loving God with all our heart soul mind and strength, we saw in last week’s show, the very next priority is then our vocation. So, we’re going to talk about family. The name of the show this week is All in the Family. We are going to talk about our families of origin, and we’ll talk then also about our vocation, whether that’s to – well it’s always to community, but whether that’s in a marriage, or holy orders, or a call to religious life, and maybe a little bit about singleness. I have just a few things to say about that mostly because there’s so much involved in this kind of discussion on family. I’m going to try my best to get in everything that I have prepared, but also, I’m going to try to narrow the focus really to our vocation to marriage, and we are going to do that in just a moment. All in the Family. Being in a family is hard isn’t it? Ha-ha. Being a parent is hard, being a child is hard too actually. It’s just hard. It’s hard to be in those very close, very intimate relationships, and all of them go through seasons. And one of my favorite movies: It’s a Wonderful Life, kind of shows us this really refreshingly honest depiction of the family. In that early part of the movie George Bailey’s life is just coming unglued. He comes home and he sees this mess the kids have made, and the daughter is playing, she’s banging on the piano, and they’re all asking for his attention at the same time, and he screams at them, and he says, “Why did we have to go and have to have all these kids anyway!?” You know? And the little girl starts crying and we can all identify with a low moment like that because we’re all part of families and we all know the hardships that come with that arrangement. In especially those that we are born into, but even those we’re trying to build ourselves. And so, as Christians we of course see family in a different light than the rest of the world. We see it as a vocation, a calling, and that’s different than something we do. For us it is a path to sanctity, and it is under the umbrella, under the protection, under the sacrament of marriage, if we are in that kind of family. And as I mentioned in the introduction, of course there are different communities. There is a vocation to the religious life. There is a vocation, a call to holy orders, to the priesthood and we’re not going to get into that so much. I don’t want to shortchange those of you who are priests, or those of you who are discerning a vocation to religious life of some sort, but here’s the thing; no matter what vocation you’re called to under that umbrella, we are all called to that community. And so, a family then, whether you are in a religious order, or a religious community, or a brotherhood in the priesthood, those are families, they're different families, but they are 03_All in the Family 1 | P a g e families. And so those relationships are necessarily difficult because God puts us with people, especially those families that we're born into that we don't choose or that have not chosen us through adoption or something like that. God puts us - well even in adoption God puts us with people in our families and in our communities specifically so that we can grow in relationship. And this is why it’s so important, this is especially important for men who sometimes sacrifice their families, and women do too, but traditionally it’s been men who are more willing to sacrifice their families on the altar of their work because they are oriented to breadwinning and to supporting their families as they should be and as they’re called to do actually, as the priest of their home. And I have struggled with that myself and I shared that a little bit in the last show, how I knew that I had a second call, a call within the call as Mother Teresa called it, but I knew I had that. And I didn’t have teaching on vocation, and so I was sacrificing my family on that altar of that call. I saw it as a call to God himself, but really, it’s an apostolate, and we’ll talk about those too. But we can all sort of see in that story in it’s a Wonderful Life, we can see ourselves in it. I think that’s why it’s such a classic movie. We see ourselves in it. And so, we do see family in a different light than the rest of the world. We are privy to God’s revelation to humanity through his word, and so our main text then is going to be in Genesis 1, and then we’re going to have a secondary text in Psalm 127. But we see the institution of the family was created by God for a specific purpose and so there is meaning and purpose inherent in the family structure itself, and I will unpack that more as we go. But sometimes you hear people say that family exists for its own sake. They’ll say that family is what it’s all about, or blood is more important than any other relationship. But family is not what it’s all about and for those of you who have difficult families of origin or you have difficult relationships in them, and who doesn’t really? But in some cases you have to go limited contact, or no contact, and all of us have had an experience where you’re at a Christmas dinner, or a reunion, or a funeral or a Thanksgiving dinner or something, where somebody in the family kind of goes off the deep end and you know there’s drama. Ha-ha And so we all know what that’s about. Sometimes we’re the ones creating the drama because we have felt outside, or maybe a black sheep or something like that. But I left my hometown, my husband and I got married, and we were really only married about a year. I moved in when we got married, well actually I moved into his house before we even got married ha-ha, if you want to know the real truth. But we got married and I moved into my husband’s house and pretty quickly because of my relationship with my father which I’ve talked about quite a bit in my book Unleashed, and all of them really, they all talk about some of it. And I’m working right now on my book on healing the father wound, and so I talk about the whole story there really. Not all the past details but sort of where I am right now in it. But what we see and what I saw sometimes, other people see sometimes, I saw pretty quickly that I was just not going to be able to live there. My dad, as I have shared previously, was in the highway patrol. He was a patrolman for his whole career, and he was controlling and manipulative and he - I just couldn’t stand it. He would park his patrol car at the end of our road. We lived on a cul-de-sac, and he would park his patrol car at the end of the cul-de-sac and like just sit there, and it just infuriated me, you know? I wanted to be out from under his control and we just up 03_All in the Family 2 | P a g e and moved, we moved to Tennessee where my husband is from and we found a church family pretty quickly and it was a small country Church. I’ve shared this story on the Journey Home and in many, many places. It was a small country church and it had that family feel, and I got very, very close to several people. One was my very first mentor her name is Pam and I love her dearly to this day. She taught me so much. She just she continues in my heart, I hold her in my heart pocket as I say sometimes. But she taught me so very much. That church family was a second family to me and those relationships that I built there were closer to me than my own family at that time.