Our Messed-Up Family

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).