Bear Ye One Another's Burdens and so fulfill the law of Christ!

We are a preacher's family!   My dad and mother spent their lives going into the country communities bearing and lifting burdens of the people and giving them hope.  My dad believed in this verse about what we were supposed to do.  He was not as easy about his own family because that cost him something emotionally deep down.  In fact, he ran to the sanctity of his bedroom and the Cardinal ballgame to get away from all the drama that came with raising a huge family of independent people.   I know because I was the kid he talked to when he said something!   And he was old when I was a teenager!

My mother listened but she did not refrain from taking any of her children on.   There is not one of the eight that I have not heard her blister with her comments to their face.   And they took it without question.   The one thing that held us together was love for Mama Cooper -- not love for each other (We have proved that we were short of that.  Why, I don't know!   Frankly, doesn't matter!)   I heard Mama say one time that the Burkes were in our same category and she said that she thought that it just happened with big families!   They were always fighting amongst themselves.    It really worried Mama that we were not her idea of what a true family should be but she didn't have a model to learn from.  

She would be beside herself now.  If she was upset when she was alive, just look at us now!   There is plenty of blame to go around everywhere and I, for one, feel the shame of it all, knowing that everyone knows and laughs at this family which has had everything good happen to it, goes ballistic when the real part of life hits it in the face.  I am the chief of sinners!

In spite of the fact that I have great children and great grandchildren who are wonderful to me, and I have a host of friends who are the best in the world and I adore, I want the feeling I used to have when we were on top of the world and stood for something good!  Anger, resentment, old age, sickness, accidents, death, no longer needed feelings have piled in and on us.   Little hurts---and not so little hurts--have made us all put up barriers so that no family member can hurt us anymore!   Well, it takes courage to love....because you always run the risk of losing!   The problem is that I don't know what, if anything, I can do about it!

In truth, somedays I don't even want to try!