Every Generation Loses Somebody

There is a great uncle nobody has met.

There is your grandmother's sister, who exists in one photograph and about four sentences, and nobody has ever explained what happened.

There is your own father's brother, whom you met twice as a child and who has been referred to in the past tense for thirty years while still being alive.

And about eighteen months ago something happened in your generation, and it has been going the way these things go, and you woke up at four one morning recently and counted them and there was one in every single generation going back as far as anybody knows.

And every single one of those absences was explained at the time. There was a reason, and the family agreed the reason was reasonable, and the person went out of the photographs gradually rather than all at once.

That is four generations of perfectly reasonable decisions, arrived at separately, by different people, none of whom ever compared notes.

What the pattern is actually made of

Let me describe how a family gets like this, because nobody in yours ever decided it.

It is not that your family is cold. Most families like this are unusually warm, which is the confusing part. What runs in a line like yours is a very low threshold for a permanent exit, and a shared understanding that once somebody is out they stay out.

Nobody teaches that. It is learned by watching. A child sees an adult removed from a family, notices that nothing terrible happens to the family afterward, and files it as an available move.

You have been handed a move rather than a coldness, and no family has ever once needed to be unloving in order to lose somebody every generation. Colossians 3:13 says forbearing one another and forgiving one another, which is the written word naming the two things a family like yours never learned, and the Holy Spirit is the one who can make a move that was normal for four generations stop being normal.

And every one of those missing people is a whole person. So is every person who did the removing. Somebody in each of those stories was probably right about something, and this article does not know which one and will not pretend to.

Your father's brother has a version. Nobody in your family has heard it in thirty years.

You are able to hold all of them as people without settling any of it, and a pattern has never once been ended by working out who was at fault in each case. The Spirit of God is what keeps a person from becoming a judge over four generations, and it is written in Colossians 3 that forbearing comes before forgiving.

Forbearing one another

Forbearing one another, and forgiving one another, if any man have a quarrel against any: even as Christ forgave you, so also do ye. (Colossians 3:13, King James Version)

There are two words in that verse and people usually only preach the second one.

Forbearing comes first. It means to bear with, to put up with, to keep somebody in the room when the matter is not resolved. It is not agreement, it is not approval, and it is very specifically not the same as forgiving.

Forbearing is what a family does in the years before anything gets settled, and it is the thing your family never learned.

You are being shown the word that comes first, and no family has ever once needed everything resolved in order to keep somebody in the room. It is written in Colossians 3:13 that we are forbearing one another and forgiving one another, which is the written word putting the bearing with before the forgiving, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes it possible to stay in contact with somebody whose situation is not settled.

And this site is not going to tell you to forgive on a schedule, or to reconcile by Christmas, or that the door must be open regardless of what happened. Those are decisions with facts in them that nobody here has.

What the verse offers first is smaller and available: not resolving it, and not removing anybody either.

You are able to leave something unresolved without removing anybody, and forbearing has never once required a person to say a thing was fine. The Spirit of God is the one who holds a family in the long middle, and Colossians 3 puts forbearing at the front of the sentence for a reason.

Not doing the move

Here is the practical part, and it is about one person, who is you.

You cannot undo the great uncle. You cannot go back for your grandmother's sister. Repairing your father's brother is not on the table either, and nobody here is telling you to try.

What is available is that in your generation, in the thing that started eighteen months ago, you do not make the move.

You are able to decline one move in one generation, and not doing a thing has never once required anybody else to cooperate with you. The Holy Spirit is the one who is present in a refusal nobody notices, and it is written that we forbear one another and forgive one another.

Not making the move does not mean pretending. It does not mean contact on any particular schedule, and it does not mean the thing that happened was acceptable.

It means one specific thing: you do not close the door permanently. Whatever else you decide about distance or contact or how much you can currently bear, the permanent version is the family move, and you are the one declining it.

You are able to keep a door unlocked while it stays shut, and leaving something open has never once obliged anybody to walk through it. The Spirit of God is what makes an undecided thing bearable for years, and Colossians 3:13 asks for forbearing before it asks for anything else.

And if the situation involves harm or danger, distance is not the family move, it is sense, and this article is not aimed at that. Take it to somebody qualified where you live.