No. 48
From Wendy Howard [Editor of Despatch magazine], Sunshine Coast, Qld, Australia.
Access Online  http://www.despatch.cth.com.au/Main/tabco_main
 

That doesn’t mean we don’t know about our family’s faults and sins.
it doesn’t mean we think our family can do wrong things and get away with it.
It means that we keep family affairs to the family.
Only for their ears!
Jenny didn’t know about loyalty and family love.
Her Aunty Rita had forgotten to pay the phone bill,
and so the phone was cut off!
Uncle Robert was really cross with her and they had a quarrel.
Next day Jenny told her friend’s mother about the phone bill
and Uncle Robert yelling.
That woman told someone else,
and she mentioned it to Jenny’s aunt.
Aunty Rita was embarrassed.
And it was all Jenny’s fault.

Jenny was growing into the kind of person
who enjoys telling about the faults of others.
She was always picking at other people,
but didn’t like it when people knew about what she did wrong herself.
We have a Christian family, too.
All those believers who trust in Jesus as their Saviour
are our family in the Lord Jesus.
We should be loyal to them as well.
God wants us to have a new kind of love,
one that is willing to forgive people.
A kind of love that is like a nice cosy blanket.
That blanket covers over many, many faults and sins in others,
and believes that they will, one day, be made beautiful inside by God.
No one is always right and good all the time, every minute of every day.
So, we have to cover them  up with our love, until they grow more like Jesus.

How about you? Do you ever expose the weaknesses of your own family?
Or your Christian family friends? It is OK to talk to someone else about family things if you desperately need to share, because you don’t know how to handle some problem.
But it is not OK to just talk about the short-comings of the members of your family and be disloyal to them. Just because you are “peeved” or put out by them.

As we get older we all grow as individuals, and that means we need parents and family protection less than we did when we were small. That does not mean that we have to show how grow up we are by trashing our parents or family to other kids.
Of course there have been problems, good times and bad times. Every family that ever was has had the bad with the good. But the love God wants us to have majors on the good things about family. And remembers that it is hard to be a parent, and stays loyal at all times. There is something very beautiful about a family that stays loyal and true to one another. Of course it goes both ways, too. Parents shouldn’t trash their kids to others, and should stay loyal to them as well!