To Be a Part of Something Bigger Than Yourself

One of the things I love about my wife’s family is the stories they tell whenever they get together.  When we were dating and we sat around the dinner table eating a simple meal of hot dogs and potato chips, there was also served a healthy helping of stories about when her little brother had tick fever, or the way her daddy used to drive his ’57 Chevy too fast when he was sixteen, or the time she broke her toe kicking her other brother in the shin.  There was a lot of laughter in the midst of the stories and it didn’t matter how many times they told the same stories,  I always enjoyed hearing them.

My family had stories, too; vacations at the beach, the boat trip from Brazil to Miami, life on the farm.  I thought most families were like mine until I spent time with my (eventual) wife’s family.  Their stories, like their family, were very different from ours but, like us, they enjoyed telling them. 

I learned recently that young people who have an active knowledge of their family stories are better adjusted than those who don’t.  If a child can tell you where her grandmother grew up, or knows what kind of work her grandfather did, she tends to have a higher self-esteem than those children who don’t know about their family heritage.  Children who can articulate stories about their crazy uncle, or their eccentric cousins, seem to do better in school than children who are oblivious to their lineage.  It is as if the stories of family, the ups and downs of fortune, the ins and outs of relationships, are a reminder that they are a part of something bigger than themselves and as a result, they are somehow better able to cope with the challenges they face in their own lives.

There is a myth in American culture that we can make it on our own without anybody’s help, and there may be rare individuals who overcome deprived backgrounds and flourish in their own lives.  But most of us who thrive do so only as a result of having been a part of a community, being part of something bigger than ourselves.

I am a part of a large community – a community that is unbound by time and space.  At the breakfast table where ancestral stories were shared, I also heard stories of Abraham and Sarah, of David and Bathsheba, of Hosea and Gomer, of Mary and Gabriel, and, of course, Jesus.  I learned that I was not only part of a family that had lived through many adventures in the 20^th Century, but I was also part of a people who had suffered, endured, and thrived through millennia – a part of a story of God’s redemption of the whole of creation.  I am a part of something that is, indeed, bigger than myself.  And that something has made all the difference.