Little Miss Muffet and Controlling Family Members

Each Tuesday morning the Make Way Partners’ staff gathers before we begin our work day for a time of sharing intimate moments along our journey. Sometimes it’s lighthearted musing and teasing (we have a couple of jester wannabes among us.) Other times it’s wrestling with weighty ministry direction and decisions. More often than not it’s working through pithy relational stuff that seems to affect all areas of our lives. The holidays tend to demand more of the latter.

In the pit of it all, this video helped us to laugh and find perspective on those relational frustrations. The rest of this blog will make more sense if you watch this short video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xRcPIyiQNjY&feature=related

Dern-a-Bing-Bong! People simply will not conform into what we want them to be, will they? When they won’t, how do we rip off their wings, pluck out their eyes, or stick on something that might not fit them in order to contort them into what we think they “should” be?    

I thought a lot about the Little Miss Muffet inside of me on Christmas day. Our family dynamics are changing, drastically so. Our children are grown and have lives of their own. Even our grandchildren wander into their own sense of being these days.

Our family talked a lot about how to stay engaged with one another over the holidays without forcing a sense of how things “ought” to be, especially based upon how things used to be. It’s easy to get stuck in our own expectations, and before we even know it, work the wonder of Little Miss Muffet ripping the “gills” off our family and sticking “noses” on our friends.

A reality check came for me as I reflected upon what the Christmas experience might feel like for an orphan—a child with no family and no expectation of friendship, intimacy, or even the simple comforts of food and shelter during the holidays, or any other time for that matter.

At 1 a.m. on Christmas morning, in the same village of our Hope for Sudan orphanage, a child was born. A son. A firstborn son to a very scared, desperately poor, and extremely young woman. As the child drew his first breath, his mother drew her last.

There was no room for the child; neither was there a mother.

In a land where millions barely escape slave raiders and starvation, legends are created to assuage the raw reality of having no means to care for a motherless newborn. One such legend teaches that a mother cannot bear to be without her child, and so she beckons him to join her in the grave.

The family cannot bear to take the child’s life, neither do they have the means to feed him, and so oft times they leave him alone in a tukel (mud hut) until he “joins his mother”…in death.

Hope for Sudan’s mere presence has begun to rewrite these legends. After an agonizing night alone, this small, newborn-Christmas child was brought to Romano, our indigenous director at Hope for Sudan. Romano received him with joy and named him Cristobal.

Hope is rising up. The entire community is being transformed as dignity replaces depravity and freedom to choose replaces the chains of despair.

The word orphan was first coined around 1300. Originally, it not only implied bereft of parents, but also meant to be “deprived of free status.”

Hum…deprived of free status…from its very inception “orphan” meant to be enslaved, at least on some level. And, of course, we know orphans are the most vulnerable people group to modern-day slavery.

I read an interesting article this morning about modern-day Christians. According to the article, we look incredibly similar to Little Miss Muffet. The article posed that if Christians spent less time “working on their relationship with God” and more time practicing being decent human beings we’d probably end up a lot closer to God. http://www.sojo.net/blogs/2011/12/27/bait-and-switch-contemporary-christianity

At first, I felt slightly off-put by the article—sounded a tad too “works” oriented for me. But as I stayed with it, I realized all the article really said was that our faith would bear fruit if, in fact, it existed.

The article also whispered of James 1:27, reminding us that true religion doesn’t take place so much inside the pristine-walled or stadium-seated worship center as it does on the muddy streets of an orphan-packed village.

My mind played back and forth between those Little Miss Muffet expectations I tend to impose upon my family and the complete lack of any expectations (because she’s been stripped of hope) an orphan experiences.    

I wondered, “How are the two thoughts (above) connected?” Other questions came to me. “If I more regularly practiced setting myself and family free from expectations, how might that impact how I better practice ‘true religion’ with the orphans?”

And if orphan means not only parentless but also loss of freedom, or to be held captive, then “What are the orphaned places in my own heart, life, and dreams?”

And “How do I orphan members of my family because they aren’t living the way I want them to?” Finally, “How can I make a safe, loving, and restorative place for not only the orphan half way around the world but also those within my own heart and within my family?”

In this New Year, may you feel God’s love of you more intensely as you silence the Little Miss Muffet judgments against the orphaned dreams our Father has for you and the orphaned members of your family—and may that love expand your heart to extend your hand to the vulnerable orphans half way around the world.

Love, your orphaned sister along the reclaiming journey of God’s family,

k