The quote wraps lovely around the coffee mug in large looping letters:
“Friends are the family you choose for yourself.”
Yes, so true. Sip the hot tea and warm thoughts of being chosen. Friendship certainly is special.
Then there is family. The real kind.
You didn’t choose them. And they certainly didn’t choose you.
Our August is full of family. We just finished a blessed ten days sprinkled with boating and camping and biking and feasting and swimming and shopping with my brother and his family visiting from Utah. We now are at Black Butte for a week with Jeff’s side of the family. At this very moment I sit in silence on the deck, looking out at towering ponderosa pines while Heidi sleeps and the rest have ridden bikes to the pool. It is the only moment of silence there has been, however, as our vacation home is teeming with four little cousins and seven adults with a couple more to come.
We’ve not seen Jeff’s brother and his family for two years and three years before that. Heidi certainly doesn’t remember seeing her cousins last, and Dutch only faintly remembered playing together two Thanksgivings ago.
We’re also a bit different. Or a lot different. They speak Spanish in their home, live in the blazing heat of Arizona and at least for awhile had gone the route of a Spanish-French immersion school. We speak English in our home, albeit not that well, we huddle close in the cool Northwestern weather, and don’t immerse ourselves in much of anything but the wading pool.
All that to say these four little cousins hardly know each other from Adam and also don’t have a whole lot in common.
And yet, within 30 seconds of their arrival, all the cousins were tramping through the house, Dutch excitedly showing them their quarters, all donning the capes that Nana had made for each. They quickly turned to outside adventures, comparing bikes and exploring the yard and, Dutch describing where he’d seen the deer last night.
After they’ve long gone to the pool and the house is quiet, I sit and think how funny it is — all of us, so different, all under one roof for seven days. I think of the quote on the mug: “Friends are the family you choose for yourself.” I certainly didn’t choose any of these people, and they certainly didn’t choose me.
But isn’t that exactly why family is so sacred?
Isn’t that the beauty of family? That we didn’t pick them and we love them anyway. That they didn’t choose us but they love us anyway.
I remember when my brother and his wife came from a missionary trip to China. They spoke of how the missionaries there, of which there were very few, referred to each other as “family.” Why? Because they certainly didn’t choose each other, but they were there and chose to love each other for the sake of the gospel. You couldn’t get in a tiff and go find some new friends. There weren’t any others! They got along because each other was all that they had. In that sense, they were family.
We live in a “De-friending” world. Facebook didn’t make us fickle friends, it just named what we were already doing in real life.
So I wonder again about the beauty of friendship being in the ability to choose.
Is preference really beautiful? Could it be we’ve set our gaze a bit low and there’s a loftier choice to be found?
What if the beauty lies not in choosing each other but in choosing love…
Sure, there’s less pride to pass around when we do less choosing and more loving. We can no longer take credit for our connections, but instead we humbly receive and extend grace-motivated love.
I’m basking in that grace-love this month as we rub shoulders with all the blessed friends we didn’t choose. There is no place I’d rather be.
{How can you choose love today? Happy Friday from Black Butte and thanks for reading.)