My Family is a Hot Mess (Part 1)

Welcome to week three of "Hot Mess." Throughout this series we've been looking at areas of life that can quickly become a hot mess, using the wisdom of Scripture to help us navigate them - and being honest about the role we sometimes play in creating them. The first two weeks were about work. This week we change arenas, and it might hit a little closer to home - literally. This week's topic: my family is a hot mess.

Today we're talking about family in the widest sense - the whole kit and caboodle. Aunts, uncles, cousins, nieces, nephews, grandparents, second cousins twice removed, everybody in the big reunion photo… and the ones not pictured. (Later in the series we'll narrow in on households - spouses, parents, and kids.) So here's the question: who's willing to admit their family is a hot mess? Actually, maybe the better question is, does anybody have a family that isn't?

Maybe you're not the one who's the hot mess, but every family has its part - the out-of-town relatives nobody talks to but everybody talks about, the family secrets and drama that could be half a season of a streaming show, the one relative who's done time, is doing time, or should be. I'll admit it: at one time or another, various parts of my family have been a hot mess. To be fair, I should drop the qualifiers and just say it - my family is a hot mess.

Family has always been messy

Here's the thing: it's not surprising, and it's not unique. Since time began, families have been a hot mess. Just look at Genesis. Adam blames Eve instead of owning his actions. Cain kills Abel out of jealousy. Noah gets drunk and curses his own descendants. Abraham passes off his wife as his sister - twice. There's a tangled situation with Sarah and Hagar; Lot's daughters; the rivalry between Jacob and Esau; Jacob deceiving his father and being deceived in turn by Laban; Joseph's brothers plotting against him and selling him into slavery. And that's all from the first book of the Bible. Family dynamics have always been a rich garden in which hot messes take root and grow.

Here's an uncomfortable truth: your family was probably a hot mess before you ever arrived. Your ancestors were hot messes before you. So were mine. My wife Erin and her mom are really into genealogy - not just the family tree, but the detective work that turns up the dirt: the horse thieves, the scandalous relationships, the ancestors tangled up in the Salem Witch Trials. If you use ancestry.com, you know you get a little leaf icon when there's a hint. I think there ought to be a little flame icon for the ancestors who were hot messes.

And I'm not convinced my descendants will find things much different a hundred years from now. Hot messes are here to stay. I think of a family like a brushy hillside. Sometimes the hot mess is a wildfire out of control; other times it's contained, almost out - but look carefully and there are always a few hot spots still burning. And if your family looks like a lush green hillside with no fire at all, good for you - but fair warning: all it takes is a change of season and a little spark. So today we'll operate on the premise that every hillside is at least a little on fire, and ask how the wisdom of Jesus helps us handle it.

Don't take it personally

The first piece of advice is to identify and process these messes correctly - which means: don't take it personally. We tend to see the actions of family members as a reflection of ourselves, both good and bad, and neither is really fair. Every individual is their own person, responsible for their own choices, regardless of their last name. I can't make you do something good; I can't stop you from doing something bad. The reputation each of us earns belongs to us alone.

So when a relative does something we don't agree with and we say they're "dragging the family name through the mud," what we're really saying is, I don't like what that person did, and I don't like being associated with it. That's fine - it means you have strong morals and a strong sense of justice. But if we genuinely believe their bad behavior reflects on us, I think that's a false premise. Think about it: have you ever been friends with a whole family except for that one sibling who's a piece of work? You don't think the whole family is dragged down by that one person, do you? Their behavior affects your relationship with them - not your opinion of everyone else.

There's a second danger here, too. If we mistakenly believe a family member's bad behavior reflects badly on us, we're more likely to respond negatively toward them - which isn't how we're supposed to respond to anyone.

"'Love the Lord your God with all your heart…' This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.'" - Matthew 22:37-39

That's where our motto - love God, love people - comes from, and no, I'm not tired of sharing it. Read on in Scripture and you find that our "neighbor" is everybody we come into contact with, including the family members who supposedly besmirch our name. Paul's famous description of love reminds us that love is not self-seeking and is not easily angered - one translation says love "is not overly sensitive," another that love "never thinks just of itself" (1 Corinthians 13:5). So when a relative does something scandalous and our first thought is how will this affect me, how will this reflect on my name, that's usually evidence we're thinking more about ourselves than about the people actually affected - sometimes including the hot mess themselves. When a family member ventures into hot-mess territory, try not to let it bother you so much. Don't take it personally.

Don't feed hate

Taking things personally can breed resentment, and resentment can quickly turn into hate. Maybe this particular hot mess isn't something that happened to someone else - maybe you were hurt directly by what a family member did or said. When you're hurt, that naturally produces a reaction: anger, hurt, feeling some kind of way. But there's a difference between feeling that temporarily and continuing to feed it until it grows into something bigger.

"Do not nurse hatred in your heart for any of your relatives…" - Leviticus 19:17

That can be easier said than done, depending on how you've been hurt. But for their good and for our own mental health, we need to avoid the things that keep us nursing hatred - revisiting old wounds, replaying the things that made us angry or sad. As Paul writes, "don't sin by letting anger control you" (Ephesians 4:26). If we keep returning to past hurts, unable to let go, there's a good chance the anger is controlling us.

So how do you let go of anger? It may involve a lot of approaches - therapy, talking it out with the person (though you might not get that chance, or it might not go well). But whatever else we do, one of the best things is to pray that God would take the anger away, and bring healing to our minds - replacing the images that keep replaying with something better - so that another person's mistake doesn't cause us to sin.

And it helps to remember that while we may not have made the same mistake, we're not sinless either. We've messed up, we can mess up, and we will mess up again. "Everyone has sinned; we all fall short of God's glorious standard" (Romans 3:23). Long before Paul, the author of Ecclesiastes said that not a single person on earth is always good and never sins (Ecclesiastes 7:20). We wouldn't want our family members nursing hatred toward us when we fail - so we need to take steps not to nurse it toward them.

Don't gossip

It's possible that through the way we respond, we don't just nurse hatred within ourselves - we nurse it in others too. And one of the main ways we do that is through gossip. As Scripture put it long before anyone updated the idea in song:

"The tongue can bring death or life; those who love to talk will reap the consequences." - Proverbs 18:21

When it comes to talking about the hot messes in our families, we probably don't think enough about those consequences. And I'm calling myself out here more than anyone, because it's hard not to show up for the tea. It's far too easy to traffic in other people's stories for shock value, for entertainment, or just because it's one of the family pastimes. Growing up, Grandma's house was sometimes like a tabloid show with cookies. We tell ourselves it's harmless because we're keeping the stories "within the family" - but we're probably not accurately assessing the damage.

Gossiping about someone's mistakes can erode other family members' trust in that person. You're poisoning the well of someone's reputation without giving them a chance to explain, apologize, or own their actions. Now, let's make a distinction: there's a difference between gossip and warning someone of a real problem that might affect them. If I tell a relative who just married in, "watch out for Cousin Daryl - he'll try to rope you into his latest scheme, so hold onto your wallet," that's not gossip; that's fair warning. Call it loss prevention. Gossip is dredging up past events that should probably stay private. Just because you know what happened doesn't mean you were meant to know it - or meant to share it.

Here's a quick test for whether a story is okay to tell: imagine you were the star of it instead of your relative. Would you be okay with someone telling that story about you? We've all got things in our past we wouldn't want broadcast.

And the consequences can trickle down through generations. Are you telling these stories in front of the younger family members - your kids, your grandkids? Doing that solidifies an image of who that relative is in their minds. So instead of forming their own opinion based on their own interactions, they'll always start from the sordid story you handed them. That creates awkwardness: the relative often doesn't understand why they're met with hesitation, mistrust, or avoidance, because they don't know the younger generation has been told. The more we pass the story down, the more we rob that person of a chance for reinvention.

Don't give up on them

There's one more "don't" I want to leave you with: don't give up on them. In his treatise on love, Paul says love "never gives up, never loses faith, is always hopeful, and endures through every circumstance" (1 Corinthians 13:7). If we truly love the family members who are hot messes, we won't give up on them. We'll act in good faith, pray, and trust that God can use the mess for our family's good and His glory. We'll stay hopeful that things can change - and in the meantime, we endure the effects with as much grace, mercy, and love as we can muster.

Let me be clear about what "endure" does not mean. In situations of emotional or physical abuse, or where someone is being taken advantage of, endure does not mean continuing to subject yourself to abuse and exploitation. When it comes to hot messes, there's a difference between drama and trauma. There may be people we have to love from a distance, because getting too close would open us up to more harm or simply be unhealthy. It is not unchristian to set healthy boundaries with people - but it is unchristian not to love. And we can love people we don't even like that much, because love is a choice.

It starts with how we look at people. Do we see the family members who press our buttons as black sheep, pariahs, a disgrace to the name - or as God's creations, worthy of love? Here's a little secret that helps with anyone: when people are a hot mess, we can see them as a failure, or as a work in progress. If I believe God isn't finished with me yet, why would I believe He's finished with them? The next time you see a hot mess, just think: God's not finished with them yet. They're still a work in progress - just like me, just like all of us.

I'll be honest: there are people in my own family I've thought I didn't want the association with, out of fear of how they'd reflect on me, or just out of self-righteousness. Because I wasn't around them much, it was easy to feed the hate - I'd hear the gossip and it would reinforce the worst ideas I had about them. But over the years, trying to love more like Christ (and getting it wrong more often than right), I've tried to see each family member as someone special to God, and to look for the best in them regardless of their reputation. And something has happened more than once: people I was ready to write off, who'd been made unsympathetic in my mind by gossip - when I actually stood in front of them at a family gathering, it was suddenly easier to see past the image and see someone God loves and is transforming, just like me. More often than not, when I saw those people in person, the love was there.

"This is my commandment: love each other in the same way I have loved you." - John 15:12

And how did Jesus model love? Unconditionally and sacrificially.

An invitation to join His family

Jesus loved us so much that He left His home in heaven and came to earth - not just to teach us how to live, but to pay the price for our sins. We were separated from a holy God by our sin, but Jesus paid the price for all of it - past, present, and future - when He offered Himself on the cross. Three days later He rose from the grave, showing His power over death itself. Now He offers us eternal life in a place He's prepared for us, an abundant life with true meaning and purpose here and now - and more than that, the chance to be called His sons and daughters and to join His family.

If you've never put your trust in Jesus and declared Him the Lord of your life, and you'd like to, you can pray a prayer like this one:

Dear Lord Jesus, I know that I'm a sinner. I know I've done wrong things. Please forgive me of my sins. Right now I ask You to be my personal Savior and the Lord of my life. Help me to turn from my sins and follow You. Thank You for dying on the cross for my sins, for rising again on the third day and taking those sins away, for saving me, and for preparing a place for me. In Jesus' name, amen.

If you prayed that prayer, congratulations on the best and most important decision you'll ever make. I pray that each day, as you follow Jesus, you'll see Him working in your life and transforming you to be more like Him. Whether you prayed that prayer today or not, if there's any way we can help - questions, next steps, or just someone to celebrate and pray with you - that's the kind of church Seacoast wants to be. Come find us after a service or reach out anytime.