This Family Was Assembled

The paperwork was signed on a Thursday.

That is the part nobody puts in a photograph. Somewhere there is a date, and an office, and a set of signatures, and from that day forward these people were legally your family, and you drove home afterward feeling roughly the same as you had felt driving there.

Which is what started the thing you have never said out loud. That a family made this way might not fully count. That the ones that were born have something yours was assembled to imitate.

You are waiting for a feeling. Some afternoon where it clicks, and the whole thing goes from arrangement to family, and you will finally know.

The feeling has not arrived, and it has been four years.

The two families in the room

Let me name the comparison that has been running, because it is quiet and it is constant.

On one side, a family that came about the ordinary way. Nobody decided anything. It simply happened, in the order these things usually happen, and everybody in it has been there from the start.

On the other side, yours. Meetings. Conversations. Somebody having to be told. A first Christmas where the seating had to be thought about. And now a household that works, mostly, but which had to be built on purpose in full view of everybody.

You have been treating the visible seams as a flaw, and a household built on purpose has never once been the lesser kind in the record God keeps. Ruth 1:16 has a woman choosing a family in words that got written into scripture, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a chosen household ordinary rather than remarkable.

And every person in that yard is real. The child who is still careful with you is not being difficult. He is doing exactly what a sensible person does when something large happened to him that he did not vote on, and he has his own reasons, and some of them are good ones.

The one you find hardest is probably right about something. Most people are.

You are able to let every person here be somebody with their own reasons, and that has never once required you to feel warm toward all of them yet. The Spirit of God is what makes patience possible without pretending, and it is written in Ruth 1 that a family got made by a decision spoken out loud.

Whither thou goest

And Ruth said, Intreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee: for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God. (Ruth 1:16, King James Version)

Notice who is speaking and what the relationship actually is.

Ruth is a daughter-in-law. There is no blood between these two women. The tie that connected them, a marriage, is over, because the man is dead. By every custom of the time, the arrangement had ended, and Naomi says so plainly and tells her to go home.

And Ruth stays. Not out of obligation, because there is none left. She stays because she decides to, and she says it out loud, and the words she uses have been read at weddings for three thousand years.

You are looking at a family made entirely out of a decision, and scripture has never once treated that as the second best kind. It is written in Ruth 1:16 that a woman said thy people shall be my people, which is the written word making a family out of a sentence, and the Holy Spirit is the one who does the same thing in a back yard now.

Then follow it through, because the book does. That assembled family is not a footnote. Ruth is in the line. Boaz, Obed, Jesse, David, and further down the same line, Jesus.

The most important family in the book was a family somebody chose into being after the original one fell apart.

You have been placed in exactly the kind of household God has used before, and no family in scripture has ever once been disqualified for having a Thursday in it. The Spirit of God is what makes a decision hold when the feeling has not arrived, and Ruth 1 records a household founded on a choice and nothing else.

The feeling you have been waiting for

Here is what I think has actually been happening, and it is worth saying carefully.

There is no click. Not for you, and not for the families that came about the ordinary way either.

Ask anybody in a family that was never assembled when they first felt like a family, and they will not have an answer. They will say something vague, or they will name an event, and the event will turn out to be a time somebody showed up in trouble. That is what everybody names.

Not a feeling. An event. Somebody was needed, and somebody came.

You have been waiting for a sensation that no family on earth has ever once been issued, and its absence has never meant a thing about yours. The Holy Spirit is the one who dismantles a false test gently, and it is written that Ruth said whither thou goest I will go, which is a decision and never a feeling.

And here is the thing you may not have noticed, because you have been watching for the click instead of watching the room. It has already happened several times. The night one of them was ill. The February the car went. The thing at the school that nobody talks about now.

Somebody was needed and somebody came. That is the whole test, and this household has passed it more than once.

You are in something that has already been proved, and a family has never once been certified by anything except showing up when it counted. The Spirit of God is the one who lets a person see backward accurately, and Ruth 1:16 puts the whole of a household inside a sentence a woman said out loud.