What is family? Part 1

I have decided to write a brief series on family. As I begin to write this series on family I want to look at several aspects:

1. A family defined
2. A family broken
3. A family restored
4. A family purpose

Looking at these areas I hope to help us all see God's intent and purpose. Yeah I am bringing God into this equation. I mean, after all He did establish the family! In fact that is a great place to begin as we define what family is and is not.

We first see structure. God creates things in a precise order. When God created the concept of family He had an order in which we learn, grow, correct, and repeat. He also created roles for those in the family. We have parents, children, grandparents and for a few fortunate ones great grandparents. We then add aunts, uncles, cousins and so on! This thing gets big fast! But for all intents and purposes let’s look at the local family unit living under one roof. We will look at God's plan in coming post.

A family begins when two people from separate families come together in marriage. They bring with them love, desires, hurts, secrets, baggage, traditions, habits, sins, hopes, expectations, and so forth. See any possible concerns? Hopfully they are brining God into this marriage as well. This is not always the case, even in "christian" homes. Then at some point they plan, or sometimes unplanned, to have kids. These two individuals, still trying to figure each other out are now raising a child. Raising this child requires time, energy, nurturing, guiding, mentoring, loving, disciplining, sacrifice, and a hundred other things all 24/7!

Here is how Webster defines the family:
1 fam·i·ly, plural fam·i·lies
1 a: a group of people who are related to each other *This sense of family can refer to a group that consists of parents and their children or it can refer to a bigger group of related people including grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, etc. It is often used specifically of a group of related people who live together in one house

His definition is a little more concise! Let me make two quick obvious observations concerning defining the family. 1) We do not get to choose the family we get when we enter this world. You may think this is a "well duh" statement, but remember this as our children are coming into this world. What is it that they are getting in to that they had no choice in the matter? 2) We do get to have a choice in how we raise our family! It is in the area of our choices that we will look at as we look deeper into this crazy thing we call family.