It left a hole in my heart when I opened up the email of prayer requests at my church last late Sunday evening.
An elderly couple in our church was requesting prayer for their son, who had made the decision to make the long drive to be with them for Thanksgiving this year. From what I've been told, it had been several years since that happened. I can only imagine the excitement they were feeling to have him back home for at least a couple days.
The prayer request was simple, but gut-wrenching. Their son had made a rest stop on his drive, falling asleep in his truck.
He never woke up.
Their boy had been found deceased in the front seat of his vehicle. No warning signs, no reason to suspect anything was wrong, no chance to say goodbye.
Thanksgiving will never be the same for them, and I hate that with every fiber of my being.
If nothing else, that tragedy has made me a bit more mindful this year of how fortunate I am to get to spend a day with family I often don't slow down enough to notice, to laugh with, remember with, and talk to. Of course families can be messy, of course they can be contentious, of course they can be challenging. Put any group of selfish sinners under the same roof for an extended period of time and you're bound to have an explosion here or there, hear harsh words spoken, or experience hurt feelings.
But none of those things nullify the love of family that transcends all the pettiness. Or at least that should transcend it.
Thinking about this grieving family from my church has made me increasingly frustrated with the ever-present voices in our culture right now who are advising us to walk away from our closest blood or adoptive relationships over something as unseemly as politics.
Whether it's Yale psychologists encouraging viewers of Joy Reid's MSNBC show that they may be better off to "disown" close family members who voted differently in the last election, or former Senate candidates bragging online about disinviting particular family members from Thanksgiving and calling them "traitors," we are living in a moment where political idolatry has become so pervasive that it threatens to strangle our basic humanity.
Family disassociation is a sociological nightmare, and from a purely civilizational standpoint, is the last thing we should be encouraging. Vice President-elect JD Vance was not wrong a week before the election when he responded to a question about how to heal the division in our country by saying,
Whether you vote for Donald Trump, whether you vote for Kamala Harris, don't cast aside family members and lifelong friendships. Politics is not worth it. And I think, if we follow this principle, we heal the divide in this country.
I believe he's right. Society begins to heal when people start prioritizing their families, friends, and communities. But let's not overlook how much it heals us individually too. Strong bonds with a brother, sister, mother, father, son, or daughter provide a temporal glimpse of the eternal, heavenly relationship God always intended for the pinnacle of His creative genius, the race of humans that would bear His image.
When those bonds are severed, whether it's done intentionally by foolishly elevating things like politics over familial love, or by the tragedy of physical death, we are poorer for it.
So count this as my sincere plea and humble encouragement to those of you who can: Make that drive, linger after the meal, reminisce and laugh together, hug a few seconds longer. And if none of that is physically possible, just pick up the phone and say, "I love you and miss you."
Remember that when the Father sent Jesus to Earth, He didn't dispatch Him to descend angelically as a grown man, nor did He send Him as a child to be fostered and fed by social organizations, raised and reared by governments.
He placed Him in the arms of a loving mother and father, to be guided and to grow within the confines of a nuclear family. In other words, to the God of eternity, family was of first importance.
May we take the time this Thanksgiving to dismiss the demonic temptation to forgo His gift in stubbornness and pride, and instead cling to our families as the messy but beautiful blessings that they are.
And may we pray for comfort and peace that passes all understanding to those for whom doing so is too late.
