The family tool box

BY JIM HALBUR

I am a pastor who works with families. Sometimes the problems seem overwhelming. In extreme situations, child protection services are needed, the anger of the parents reaches a dangerous level—but child protection is backed up until 2008. Less life-threatening, but worrisome just the same, teenage kids drop out of school or end up in jail. Less dramatic, sometimes family unhappiness just festers like a fungus and everyone suffers silently.
What to do?

I plan to write some helpful words about relational skills for those trying to build strong families. I call it the Family Toolbox. We need a hammer to work out our differences, a blueprint to give us an image of what we’re going for, a level to get to consistency and fairness and a storage bin to bank good memories, for example.

Tool # 1 Love, the glue that holds the family together
Glue bonds or holds things together. There are glues for every climate and practically every material. Many glue types are stronger than the surfaces they are bonding. Love is the glue that holds a family together.
Thirty years ago, a friend of mine found out his girlfriend was pregnant. A baby was not in his plans. His emotions and feelings told him to get an abortion. It seemed like it would have been an easy solution. His girlfriend did not agree. It created great tension between them and their families. He could see how valuable his girlfriend was to him, though, so he chose to make a commitment to her. They decided to keep the baby and get married.

Now, married for 30 years, they have six children. Their first was a boy who now has four children of his own.
It is a given that Love is the bo

ding ingredient of a strong relationship.

We all believe we know love when we feel good about someone or that person makes us feel good about ourselves. You may be asking, “How can I nurture bonding love in our family?” First, we need to consider what ingredients make up love. For love to be strong, it needs to be less dictated by emotion and feelings and more driven by a choice to love and a commitment to love. Feeling and emotions change with the wind. You cannot trust feelings and emotions alone because they make a weak bond. None of us likes it when someone in a relationship with us wakes up one day and says, “I don’t feel like I love you any more.” Neither do kids, because they are often crying in their room, sick with anxiety about the stability of what is supposed to be their stronghold. The next generation needs to learn to develop a love bond and relational skills that are stronger than emotions and feelings.

The next thing is to realize that everyone has value as a person and we were all created equal and are all worthy of love. Based on that, our love for a person should be constant and unchanging. What attracts you first in a relationship typically are interests, values, and choices. On these things you base your connection, your feelings and emotions. But you do not necessarily back out of a committed relationship because of differing interests, values or choices. As a child you may have experienced this from one or both of your parents when you developed interests, values or choices different than theirs. The result is you may have experienced a break in the bond of love. We don’t have to agree with interests, values or choices of our family members. Poor choice does not equal poor person. To keep a love bond we need to separate the person from their interests, values or choices to remember their value as a person. Remember real love is the glue.

The next item in the tool box is a saw—to cut off the rough edges.