What follows
are three ideas I have rolling around in my head. I have not completely worked
out a smooth connection of these ideas, but see if you can follow where I’m
headed.
First, take a
quick scan of the families in the Bible, even the ones in the ancestry of
Jesus, and you’ll find a mess. Abraham’s a bit of a character whose philosophy in
ethics seems to be that the ends justify the means. If you’re his wife Sarah,
this is not good news. On two separate occasions, whether concerned for his own
life or that the promise of God might fail, Abraham throws Sarah under the bus
by having her play the role of sister (she is, in fact, his half-sister) rather
than wife. On one of those occasions, it’s implied that the Pharaoh had a sexual
relationship with Sarah (Gen. 12:15b).
There are
additional choices of Abraham’s that are problematic, such as enriching himself
in Egypt through his deceit with Sarah, then his passivity under pressure from
Sarah and the ensuing relationship he has with Hagar. And this is father
Abraham!
The apple
doesn’t fall far with Isaac following his father’s bad example of mistreating
his wife. When famine hits the land, Isaac takes Rebekah and heads out of town.
When he settles in Gerar, the men of the land inquire about Rebekah. To save
his own skin, Isaac tells the men that Rebekah is his sister. Mercifully,
Rebekah is spared any abuse.
Which makes
me wonder how much of that duplicity is either the cause or the result of the
way Isaac and Rebekah parent their sons. True, Paul says in Romans 9 that God
told Rebekah, regarding her twin sons, that “the older will serve the younger.”
But did she then share that with Isaac? Whether she did or didn’t, Isaac favors
Esau and the painful outcome is not surprising. There’s a terrible family
split, and when Jacob flees for his life little does he know that he will never
see his beloved mother again.
Jacob turns
out to not be a stellar example of virtue either. The same ethical faults of
his father and grandfather show up. Jacob, too, is a deceiver, and cowardice
shows up over and over in his life. The end justifies the means is the same
mantra that characterizes Jacob as much as his progenitors.
We could go
on to explore the line of succession through whom God chose to work
specifically into his family name—men like Judah and David and Solomon. All of
them created extensive and painful family trouble.
If your
family has brokenness within it, you have some distinguished company.
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Second, I came
across a book review the other day that I can’t let go of. The book reviewed
was published in 1970 and is entitled, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses
to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States, by the economist Albert Hirschman.
The reviewer says this book is one of the “top 3 most important books a student
in the social sciences should read.” Well, then…
The book
explores the options people have when they are no longer satisfied with their
employer, organization, or country. The options boil down to two: voice and
exit. Voice is where a person expresses discontent and attempts to improve the
organization. Exit means a person or group leave when it’s realized that the
organization is decaying. Hirschman writes, “Under what conditions will the
exit option prevail over the voice option, and vice versa?”
This kind of
analysis catches my attention because, as I’ve noted in other posts, macro
concepts applied in the business world and even on the global stage also apply
at the micro level of marriage and family. A civil war at the national level is
divorce at the personal level.
As you might
expect, voice is far messier than exit. Voice is defined as any attempt to
change, rather than escape from, an objectionable state of affairs. My
impression from reading the book review is that voice ranges on a spectrum from
mild, like questioning why something got handled the way it did, to extreme,
like yelling and even violence in a last-ditch attempt to force some kind of
change or response.
If voice proves
ineffective, then people start considering exit. The book reviewer then makes
this interesting observation: “For exit to work as a mechanism of recuperation
from decline, it is ideal for an organization to have a mixture of ‘alert’ and ‘inert’
members. The exit of alert members provides feedback to the firm—‘People are
leaving, maybe we should figure out why.’
“Inert members
provide the firm with time and financial cushion for the recuperation to take
place. In other words, it’s best if most members are unaware of, or unperturbed
by, decay.”
Could this,
then, explain why, in some families, some members “get it” while others don’t?
Some are “alert” and ask questions or at least try to signal voice through
problematic behavior, while “inert” members are either not paying attention or
are not affected by the decaying nature of others’ relationships.
A
complicating factor in determining when and how people use voice and exit is
loyalty. If you really care about an organization or have high regard for the
institution of marriage and family, then the less likely you are to exit. At
the same time, loyalty means you’re more likely to try to use your voice to
effect change. To outsiders who have no skin in the game, a person’s loyalty under
conditions of decay looks illogical.
There are
many more insights in this book review that I’d like to explore, but for now I’ll
just say that if you’re a Purist at all (see last month’s post) we should be
very careful to not judge someone when they choose to exit if we don’t know the
details of their story. It’s possible they’ve exhausted their voice under
conditions which are no longer habitable.
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Third, in
some marriages and families, when mess and brokenness need to be addressed, voice
is either suppressed or not allowed. When I see this in my counseling office,
it often comes down to power, fear, and/or shame. As painful as that is, please
know that however flawed and broken your life and family may be, you have a
Voice who advocates for you. Christ is your Voice in heaven, speaking to the
Father confidently and with joy on your behalf (Romans 8:33-34). And the Spirit
of Christ is God’s Voice in your heart, speaking to and reminding you that through
Christ you are a beloved and favored member in God’s holy family (Romans
8:14-16).
Because “Jesus
and the ones he makes holy have the same Father. That is why Jesus is not
ashamed to call them his brothers and sisters” (Hebrews 2:11).
