Human Sorrow
by Susan Anspaugh

            Do you ever hate your family?  There are times when I am so angry with them I do not know what to do.  We ooze dysfunction.  It rolls off of us and accumulates in great pools of slimy malfunction, egged on by total inability to communicate, and compounded by harbored resentment and cleverly disguised sorrow.  Sometimes the pain of it swallows me alive.

            My husband and I are both Christians.  He became a believer as an adult and I as a 12-year-old child.  We just didn’t follow the guidelines and we made poor choices.  He has an excuse since he was essentially raised outside the church.  I thought I knew more than God and did not want to miss out on the good things of life.  So, as a divorced, remarried, non-blended family unit raising an ADD grandchild from an adopted stepchild who is bipolar; a husband currently unemployed; and an adult child of my own with alcohol issues who my husband despises…….Do I need to continue? 

            The ripples of poor decisions just keep rippling out.  I married a nonbeliever the first time.  Oh, my word.  Of course I was madly in lust the second time and had apparently learned nothing.  Once again, I thought I could intentionally make decisions God said not to make and somehow everything would be alright.   Now I watch my own son and know he is poking holes in his life and I cannot stop him.  How much of this is the direct result of my own selfish actions?

            Israel was God’s own chosen people.  He very specifically told them how to live their lives, but particularly to love Him more than anything else and to follow him rather than the world system.  So, being humans who knew so much more than God, they proceeded to marry nonbelievers and have children from these unions and worship the world and the world systems more than the eternal God.  The result?  When Jesus, the son of the living God and their Messiah, appeared, they did not even recognize him.  In fact, they eventually crucified him because he pointed out their sins.

            In Matthew 23:37-38, Jesus says, “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing.  Look, your house is left to you desolute.”

            I know this sorrow.  I feel it when I look at my child and want to stop him, but I can’t.  I feel it when I deal with this grandchild with all his problems compounded by parents who abandoned him, and I cannot stop it.  I see it in the mess my own life often is, full of conflict and turmoil that did not have to be there.  Do you not think my father God looks down on me and all his other wayward children with the same sorrow, asking ‘why will you not?’  Human sorrow?  Yes; caused by human decisions rippling through time.