Things aren't always as they seem.
In the past few months we've had families or kids in families or parents contact us by varying avenues and lament their very real, very raw struggles.
"This man-child needs to move out."
"My parents are at each other's throats."
"I'm so depressed, I can't face another complaint about what I'm serving for dinner or how slowly the laundry was delivered."
"They are sleeping together but we can't tell anyone because of the judgment we'll receive in our church."
These are real struggles, and we've lived long enough to get to a place where we now say, "Nothing - and I do mean nothing - shocks us anymore."
And then I open up my laptop and there appears Facebook. Ahhhh, Facebook.
The same families - the one with the disrespectful and ungrateful young man, the one with the volatile marriage, the depressed mom, the teens having sex - those families are gushing about how beautiful and sweet life is within their four walls, as if they have found the key to everlasting domestic bliss.
My eyes widen in disbelief. And that's my point: maybe your eyes should widen in disbelief, too, because maybe you are the mom, the dad, the adult child who is wondering why everyone else got such a cool, loving, supportive, excellent family and you got, well, something less.
I'm not calling out the families who are posting their supposed family harmony. I understand the appropriateness of not airing dirty laundry, as it were, to the 1.35 billion people on that one social media platform. I also understand that sometimes, you just need to focus on what's going right.
But if your tendency is to think those families are doing it right and you are doing it wrong, here's what you need to know:
Everyone is doing it wrong.
It would be wonderful and life-changing if everyone could feel safe enough to be transparent in every arena, but it's a fallen world and we don't. We don't feel like we're safe to talk about the real stuff around real people. Some of us have a few friends we trust to love us through our bad choices and mistakes, but many don't even have one.
If that's you, remember this: no one has it all right, except Jesus. That's what makes the gospel such good news! We can't be perfect and we won't be perfect while we're on earth, but God sees Jesus when He looks at us, and Jesus is perfectly perfect.
#ForRealFriday reality check.
