When Family Exposes the Monster Within

I remember the day I discovered I was a monster. 

My family had just moved to the Chicago-land area for my husband’s job after I had given birth to our second child. We moved to an apartment in an affluent neighborhood that my husband hand-picked, knowing it would remind me of the idyllic town in which I grew up. The combination of a new home, no family in the area, and two very young children provided me with the perfect opportunity to step away from my career and do what I had always dreamed of–staying at home with my children.

This particular day, the kids and I had just returned from the perfect stay-at-home mom morning of playing at the park and going to the library. Now I found myself parked on the tree-lined street, living the mom-life dream with everything but a Starbucks latte, screaming at the top of my lungs for my two-year-old to, “PLEASE STOP SCREAMING!” The hypocrisy is piercing to write, but the response felt totally natural and desperately appropriate in the moment. 

As you can probably guess, screaming at my toddler did nothing but add to his exasperation. To his emotional meltdown, he now added a flood of tears. So, I clenched my jaw and thanked God that he couldn’t unbuckle himself from the car seat as I laid my head on the steering wheel, fuming with a combination of anger and frustration. This was the perfect day. What could possibly be bothering him, I thought? And where in the world is my anger coming from? I have never been an angry person!

Sadly, this was not the last time I lacked self-control with my tongue, nor was it my son’s last time whining over nothing discernibly wrong. In fact, this cycle of whining, complaining, yelling, and repenting is a very familiar routine that my children and I often dance. For years it baffled me how they could whine about everything until it dawned on me that most conversations I had included whining about their whining. 

Monkey see, monkey do?

One of the hardest parts of parenting has been recognizing that my children are sponges. For better or for worse, they absorb so much of what they see and hear in the home. As they grow, they then become like mirrors, constantly reflecting the righteous laws of God that I do not live up to and reminding me of my need for a Savior.

However, they also come into the world with their own unique sin patterns. With this combination of absorbing my sinful patterns and bringing in their own unique sin struggles, our home sometimes looks more like a haunted house than Little House on the Prairie.

Family life seems to daily reveal my shortcomings. While other areas of life can also do this, I have found that the security of family bonds can allow some of the harshest truths about myself to surface. I have also wondered, however, if this is part of God’s design for the family? 

The Hidden Gift of Family Conflict

Have you ever read Romans 8 and found it might be too good to be true? The summit of this mountain of a book ends in the astounding truth that for those in the covenant of grace through Christ, Paul is “convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, or anything else in all creation will be able to separate you from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus your Lord (Romans 8:38).” In Christ, we are blood-bought children of our Abba, Father, God. We are adopted into His family, and what Paul alludes to is an unbreakable bond. 

While Christian families are very broken reflections of the familial love of God, I do think that His design for the family is to help us grasp this love better. As we sin and are sinned against most within our families, we also have the best opportunities to repent, seek God’s forgiveness, and see the beauty and power of reconciliation more than anywhere else.

Because spouses are bound by the covenant of marriage, a covenant that binds not just husband to wife, but also unwed children to parents (Genesis 2:24), we have the opportunity, in a way unlike any other relationship, to go to war with our sin. The very fact that the bond is not broken by sin simultaneously allows our sin to surface rather than remain hidden, and can also provide the security and devotion to turn from it in love for one another, practicing what Jesus commands in Matthew 18 about forgiving even up to seventy times seven.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not saying that family gives us license to sin. As Paul says, "Therefore should we continue in sin so that grace may multiply? Absolutely not! How can we who died to sin still live in it?" (Romans 6:1) But, as our families reveal the monster of sin that is already in all of us, they also provide us with the opportunity to reflect the grace of God in uniquely powerful ways, helping us in our battle to "throw off every sin that entangles" (Hebrews 12:1).

The Grace That Meets Our Brokenness

God’s mercies are new every morning, and great is His faithfulness (Lamentations 3:23). As your family, maybe like mine, has revealed more and more of the brokenness of your heart and the hearts of your family members, remember that God’s mercies are new every morning, and do not give up the fight against sin. As my pastor often says during wedding ceremonies, before every other institution, even the church, God instituted the family as the basis of human flourishing. No matter how broken your family is, it is worth fighting for. 

Of course, there are some sins in a family that do ultimately lead to complete breakdown and might even require, particularly in the case of abuse or neglect, strict boundaries and separation. But, if your family life reveals a frustrating sin pattern of anger, discontent, selfishness, or any of the other sins most of us struggle with, press into Jesus and “do not grow weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up” (Galatians 6:9).  

Seek reconciliation. Experience the unconditional love of God in your own heart as you forgive and ask for forgiveness within your family. Strive in the Spirit to show a broken world the glory of God in the gospel of Christ through the simple act of not growing weary of doing good and loving your family well, even in all of its brokenness.