Greg knew that he had mixed motives in wanting a lovely, peaceful, smart, and devoted wife whom he, a not-so-handsome, peaceful, smart, or strong husband, could love with equal or greater devotion. Greg knew that he didn’t deserve anything of the sort. But he still wanted such a wife and so prayed that it would somehow, someday, and some way come to pass. Yet Greg wanted more than to find the love of his life. Greg also wanted a blessed family life. As well as Greg had done for himself in the early part of his adult life, he remained hollow and believed that he would always be so until he could claim a good family life.
Desire
Why so many of us want a good family life has psychological, physiological, philosophical, and spiritual answers. Getting a sense for why you want the best family life may help you achieve it. Knowing why you hunger for a family that is healthy, growing, maturing, gracious, and joyful may help stoke your fires for achieving that family life. As one of the above vignettes has already illustrated, some of us have the psychological need to relive and repair our childhood experience of family, in the hope of improvement. Others would opine, philosophically, that a good family life provides the routines, structure, comforts, and shared labor we generally need for a decent life. And still others would say, scripturally, that God offers us the richness of family and the blessing of children, while desiring that we go forth and multiply. Ask around, and you’ll get these and other helpful answers. But recognize, explore, confirm, and amplify your own hunger for a blessed family life.
Physiology
As the sketch immediately above suggests, some of us have what might better be described as an unarticulated physiological need for a good family life. Humans, although blessed with divine reasoning and a rationalizing spiritual dimension, are still fleshly organisms, with natural impulses like non-human organisms. Yet don’t think of our species’ desire to propagate as animalistic, involving only the brief act of conception. Animals of all kinds have fierce desires not so much to conceive but to raise and nurture their young in partnership with their co-parent. When a man or woman expresses a desire for a good family, they may be answering a call embedded deep within their physiology in a way that we can only experience but not understand. Take no shame, then, in simply wanting a good family, without being able to say why. Doing so may be something deeply, strangely, and profoundly ingrained in your organic makeup. Living out your embodied life can mean more than living an examined and rationalized life.
Conformity
Family life also has a comforting ordinariness to it. The prominence in film and literature of the protagonist as a fierce loner is precisely to mark how quotidian family life is. Art sets the loner sharply off against the mass of us who find our best life in the ordinary rhythms of family life, to illustrate that ordinariness and perhaps to relieve some of its occasional frustrations. The desire for a good family life is so ubiquitous that it represents conformity. Some of us, then, may think that we want a good family life mostly because everyone else does, too. And again, take no shame in conformity. Traditions are powerful repositories of good natural and common sense, proven so over centuries or millennia. If everyone is doing it, then there may be something to it. If you’re going along to get along, forming and leading a family primarily because it seems to be what’s expected of you, then perhaps don’t fight it. You may not necessarily have anything deeper, more urgent, or more profound that would have you do anything differently. Don’t, for instance, abandon your family and suffer society’s rightful condemnation for doing so, simply to chase a dream that hasn’t even yet manifested itself. Stick with a good family life. Don’t let a restless age fool you into its sacrifice.
Philosophy
It’s easy to philosophize one’s way into wanting a good family, too. Philosophy is all about the fundamental reality, or you could call it absurdity, of human consciousness within a plainly material world. With these strange minds of ours, constantly observing, grasping, and shaping a world of which we are both a part and not a part, our overwhelming need is to root ourselves in that reality in a way that resonates with it. Welcome to the family. Living without a family is to teeter on the edge of nihilism’s bottomless chasm or narcissism’s ugly chaos. Our sanity, our literal mentation, depends on social interaction. The mind goes gradually or swiftly crazy without a companion or group of companions to continually bounce things off, which is why when we’re alone too long we begin to talk to ourselves. And when we’re alone way too long, we start talking to coconuts as if they were companions. Family may drive you crazy at times. But family’s absence will surely drive you crazier. Recluses aren’t alone because they’re crazed. They’re crazy because they’re alone. Let family be your sanity, not just your comfort.
Spirituality
Spiritual grounds also compel us to want a good family life. Our consciousness descends from the ultimate ideal above who gives meaning to all matter including human life. When God breathed his rationality into us, giving us the gift of conscious life, he promptly saw that our rationality demands companionship against whom to reflect that consciousness. Yet God also knew that our companions must not give us perfect reflection, for mirrors only turn consciousness narcissistically inward, which is not the purpose of life. The purpose of life is instead outward in gorgeous sacrifice. So God gave us useful opposition, family members having their own needs and ruminations, to help us turn our own ruminations outward to realize life. God made humankind male and female with the mutual role to bring forth new male and female life. Our image within the family is his image, for he, too, holds Father, Son, and the communing Spirit within his life. When you desire a good family life, your desire is for the Spirit of the God who gave you life.
Sacredness
Thus, desiring a good family life isn’t just a physiological imperative, conforming act, utilitarian move, or spiritual discipline. Your desire for a good family life is a desire after the sacred life. When you pursue a good family life, you seek after the divinely exalted life. To pursue a good family life, you must reach out of the material world and into the greater beyond from which goodness proceeds. Your source for a good family life is the same source for life itself. You must keep your vision fixed in that realm from which goodness and life flow. You cannot draw enough goodness out of the world to guide your family life because the world is not goodness’s source. The more you treat goodness within family life as a sacred gift, and the more you rely on the otherworldly giver of that good gift for greater goodness and life, the more your family will prosper. Your family may not always avoid hardship and loss but should instead see its way through hardship and loss to endless freedom from loss within glorious divine life.
Others
Perhaps, though, your desire for the best family life is not a desire you hold for yourself but instead for others. If so, then you are exhibiting a superior desire. We show no greater love than to lay down our lives for others, beginning with our family members. And we find no greater joy than to see our family members trust in their rescue from worldly wearies and trust in their ultimate redemption from all worries, on the example we give them. Parents often say that their greatest satisfaction is their children’s joy, rescue, and redemption. To experience that satisfaction, though, parents must give of themselves after the fashion that the giver gave of himself, laying down his life in fruitful sacrifice. When a family’s leader focuses on others, particularly other family members but also others beyond the family, the family prospers. Keep giving of yourself for your family members, prompting them to do likewise, and you will have the satisfaction of seeing not only their rescue and redemption but also their role in the rescue and redemption of others.
Redemption
Redemption is indeed a marker of a family’s best life. When concluding so, though, you need not treat redemption as solely a spiritual construct. Redemption has both divine and worldly meanings, both of them highly relevant to your family’s best life. To redeem means both to rescue from faults and to retake possession. The spiritual form of redemption implies God rescuing us from our corruption to regain us as his dearest possession. You could justly desire that God would rescue and receive back your family members despite their broken condition. The worldly form of redemption implies avoiding the worst of what our family may be due for all its faults, and instead enjoying reprieve from predictable and deservedly difficult consequences. You’d want your family to have a second chance with its relationships, reputation, resources, and other opportunities, wouldn’t you? Every family needs second and third chances, and many more opportunities to press on toward the prize without guilt’s fatal weight. You are right to most highly value your family’s redemption.
Absence
Sometimes, the biggest spur to wanting something is to receive its opposite. We’ve all had family struggles. We are each broken, limited, selfish, and contentious beings. And that’s on our good days. On our bad days, we’re far worse. Stir that pot, and you’ll sometimes have a toxic family mix. Those moments of worst contention, though, are also the moments that make us want our best possible family life. It’s like the child of family strife who in adulthood studies to be a family psychologist. Nothing will make you want to fix a leaky roof more than a daily downpour. Family members generally seek counseling when the family is struggling, not when the family is joyfully sailing along. Take no shame in wanting a good family life because you’ve experienced what a not-good family life is like.
Reflection
What, if anything, do you see as the source of your desire for a good family life? On a scale from one to ten, how strong is your desire for a good family life? What increases your desire for a good family life, and what decreases that same desire? What one event or attribute in your family would give you the greatest satisfaction? What one event or quality in your family would give you the greatest grief? Do you care for your family members more than you care for yourself? What best demonstrates your care for your family members? If you disappeared today, what would your family members remember about how you led your family? Does your family keep you sane? How well or poorly do you do when away from your family for longer periods? How deeply does your family need and appreciate your presence? Are your words and actions constantly rescuing and redeeming your family from its worst faults and their consequences?
Key Points
The desire for a good family life can have several different roots.
A good family life may be an ingrained physiological imperative.
A good family life may also express conformity with the social order.
Family life sustains sanity with constant social interaction.
Family life is also the gift that the giver gave us in his own image.
Your desire for a good family life is thus a reach for the sacred.
A good family life also facilitates the rescue and redemption of others.
A good family life requires redemption from worldly worries.
Family struggles make us want a good family life even more.