Do you have a good relationship with your family? Loving parents? Siblings who hang out together even as adults? Cousins, aunts, uncles, grandparents, and maybe even in-laws, nieces, and nephews who get together at holidays? Or do you maybe come from a broken or disconnected family? Maybe you don’t know the last time you saw your extended family all together. Or maybe family gatherings are more stressful and intense than they should be. Or is your family spread out all over the country and you don’t even know most of them? 

Growing up, I thought my family was pretty decent and even though they were annoying at times, I knew my extended family (at least the side we spent holidays with) loved me and they were mostly fun to hang out with. I knew my other set of grandparents loved me too, but because of certain dynamics, we did not spend as much time with that side of the family. In fact, I always thought of it as a special treat when we got to celebrate a holiday with that side of the family, which included the cousins close to my age. 

Now flash forward to me as an adult; the family that we spent all of the holidays and many of our birthdays with are no longer in our lives and we are starting to connect more with my other set of grandparents. If I look back and am super honest, we were never very close with any of our extended family, despite what I may have assumed as a child. I loved all my cousins and thought we would grow up as friends, but that has not happened. We are not even connected on social media, which feels like the least we could have done to try to have some sort of relationship as adults. 

All this to say, my family is neither the greatest family nor the worst family in the world. I feel like I can relate to some aspects of having a functional family and some aspects of having a dysfunctional family. Thankfully, through all of that, I have always had a good immediate family. I know that is not the case for everyone and I am very thankful for that. I am sorry if you are part of a dysfunctional family and wish your family was more “normal”. I get that feeling. 

Whether your family couldn’t be any closer or couldn’t be more dysfunctional and separated, we are called to love our family. That looks different for each person and in each situation. The ways we love people are dependent on our relationships with them and sometimes we have to love people from afar. 

One big thing that I have learned over the years when it comes to loving family members who are difficult to love is the concept of loving them from afar. This is not your opportunity to secretly hate and ignore family members while claiming that you love them. It is simply knowing that they do not respect your boundaries, or you as a person, and still loving them, but choosing to stay away for your own sanity or to prevent any unnecessary drama. This can be difficult to actually do, though. It is so much easier to hate and ignore family members who rub us the wrong way, but as we talked about a couple weeks ago, the way that God wants us to love people is not the way the world tells us we should. God wants us to love people, even when they are not easy to love. Even if they disagree with us politically and always have to point that out. Even if they have to constantly pressure us about our relationship status or life choices. Even if they were/are abusive in any capacity. 

I wish I could give you an easy to-do list of how to love challenging family members from afar, but it is not that easy, and honestly, I still don’t have it figured out for myself. I don’t think I realized how much I was struggling with this until a family member got sick and was put on hospice in the fall. I had so many emotions that I could not even identify all of them. I realized that I still had some fight in me that wanted to go and explain exactly why I have had to stay away for the past several years. I wish I could say that I love all of my family members unconditionally, despite not being in contact with most of them, but that is something that I am still working on and trying to figure out. 

If you have a close-knit family and spend holidays and birthdays together, I am so happy for you! If you do not, know that you are not alone. If you fall somewhere in-between, like me, you are also not alone. If you feel frustrated or confused because your family isn’t dysfunctional, but it’s not functional, that is where I was for years. That is a hard position to be in and I hope your situation gets better. As always, Elizabeth, Katelyn, and I are here if you need to talk. 

Abbi