We just had our first family reunion in . . . We can’t quite remember if it has been 20 or 30 years since we all gathered. Probably closer to 30. My cousin’s wife told me she had prepared their young children: “You’ll probably see a lot of people who look like Daddy.”
And it’s true. There’s a strong resemblance in the McCranie family—Mama and her siblings and the cousins. The first cousins grew up together, and even the few who lived away from Shelby County, Alabama, visited several times a year because our grandmother said they had to. Period. But as we got older, with spouses, kids, and grandkids coming into the picture, it got harder and harder to bring everybody together. Until COVID pushed Mama over the edge. The whole time she was quarantined, all she could talk about was how she missed her family and how, the minute we had a vaccine, she wanted to see EVERYBODY. We managed a good 50+ I’d say. And it was pretty amazing.
A college friend who had heard me talk about my family once told me, “It’s like you’re going through life with this giant safety net under you.” She was right—I have indeed enjoyed a safety net, held up by close relatives on both sides of my family. I took that for granted when I was young but not now.
I’ve been thinking about our family this morning—what makes us us. And I think so much of our identity is spiritual—it’s a shared faith passed down from one generation to the next. But it’s also mutual respect. The cousins were taught to respect our elders, while our elders took an active interest in all of us. It went both ways. Now I’m an elder! There are so many young cousins coming along. And that family resemblance is right there on those sweet faces.
There's one more tie that binds us. We've always had an awareness that we’re part of a story, one that goes back many, many years and connects all of us, past, present, and future. That story has been shared and passed down from Grandme to her children to their children to their children . . . and on it goes, this story we carry with us, reminding us of who we are and where we came from and how we're forever bound together as a family.
When Aunt Joyce passed away, her service included a reading of Scripture that speaks to that same familial connection between Christians and God:
For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life,
nor angels, nor principalities,
nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come,
Nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature,
shall be able to separate us from the love of God,
which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Romans 8: 38-39
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