Our families are being fed a line about “having it all.” But that’s not the end of the story.
The summer before my sophomore year in college, I hit the jackpot for a place to stay during a youth ministry internship. Styled as an antebellum mansion, the home’s entire well-decorated third-floor apartment was mine. I was exceedingly grateful, stumbling in from night after night with hyper teenagers.
Yet at the risk of sounding judgy? Something felt…off.
The largest home I’d ever stayed in seemed perpetually empty. To be fair, I had come from a home with a revolving door of hospitality. One could appreciate the silence. When its four family members—including a local politician and deacon, with a former beauty queen thrown in—were indeed home, they retreated to the house’s gym or their private quarters.
Most of the exquisite rooms lay largely untouched save by the housekeeper. I don’t recall a meal eaten together the length of the summer; staples in the pantry had largely passed their shelf life (who knew baking soda expired?). The family held a baby shower while I was gone—I recall baking cheesecakes for it before I left, and they had plans to include butter molded in the shape of sheep.
But the experience confounded my developing brain: three floors with minimal relationships to fill it; the kitted-out kitchen for a family that didn’t cook for three months straight.
Maybe I’ve formed too much of a straw man for you. Maybe you’re thinking, Didn’t I see this is-your-wealthy-life-really-living trope in The Family Man?
Something like it, yes. But there’s a reason our culture resonates with themes of “having it all” while living hollowly. The sobering tragedy of celebrity suicide strikes me as a particular example of the brick wall at the top of the American-dream staircase.
We want to know: Do our relentless appetites for fulfillment eventually deliver, or is future satisfaction just a life-sized hamster wheel?
In 2022, the U.S.’ GDP was 40% greater than that of China, second in the world—and over five times that of the next two largest economies, Japan and Germany. Yet we are lonelier than ever.
You’ve likely heard of the U.S. Surgeon General’s Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation. Author Johann Hari relates in Lost Connections how in the 1970s, social scientists asked, “How many people in your life could you call in a time of crisis?”
The most common answer was three.
Today’s most common answer? Zero.
Hari continues, “every one of the social and psychological causes of depression and anxiety [social psychologists] have discovered something in common. They are all forms of disconnection.”
And that disconnection lies not just outside of our families.
Our families own more and enjoy more physical comfort than ever. But are they truly stronger than ever? Has our “pursuit of happiness,” of more and better, shaped us into a truly stronger society?
For me, this recalls my family’s years in Uganda, where corruption in the construction industry could take on a dangerous angle (stay with me, here). Engineering drawings would warrant a certain grade of rebar or compressive strength of concrete for structural soundness. But if a contractor chose to use a lower grade of either—considering the rebar would be unseen, and most people couldn’t tell you a thing about concrete—he could easily skim the remaining finances for himself.
The building appeared as strong as one built with the proper specs. Until, in tragic cases, the building collapsed.
How much more when our families structure themselves against ideals—money, significance, success, comfort, image, power, approval—never designed to hold the building’s weight?
If we can set aside the fierce politicization around disintegrating family structure, science does indicate our families significantly impact who we become, for better or worse. (Shocker, right?)
The Center for Disease Control’s survey of over 17,000 adults and their Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) reveals inextricable ties from our largely familial experiences to lifelong well-being—like abuse, emotional and physical neglect, and domestic violence. ACEs were linked to educational difficulty; being bullied; lack of resilience; chronic, even life-threatening health problems; mental illness; and substance abuse.
Our education, government, economy, health, and communities have always needed to work with or against the grain of nuclear families. In the end, the structural integrity of our families affects all of us.
But—perhaps due to the political factor—it’s all too easy to speculate on solutions for “those dysfunctional families.” While healthy societies must look out for its families and for each other, perhaps it’s wisest to first and foremost attend to our own rebar, so to speak.
We can start by asking ourselves questions like,
Perhaps the level of dysfunction or disconnection in your own family feels…overwhelming. But here, allow me one more metaphor of structural weakness. Ancient biblical parable describes a house built on rock, another on sand. Then, the inevitable storms of both, the inevitable fall of one (Matthew 7:24-27).
Yet to be clear, the “rock” in this story isn’t even the family, the basic unit of society. Beneath even that critical building block, there’s a further atomic level—and something infinitely more steadfast.
The rock in the story is only Jesus. He’s the one who reminds the world, “one’s life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions” (Luke 12:15).
Our societies rise or fall, yes, through families. But only as far as those families find healing for their own brokenness. Take their cues, and stake their trust on this higher power can we stake any lasting hope for change.
Restoring family relationships is a messy part of God’s redemption story.
Biblical families encountered sexual abuse (David’s family), adultery (David again), violence (Jacob), favoritism (Isaac), racism (Moses), unwanted pregnancy (Tamar), infertility (Hannah), hatred (Joseph), trafficking (Joseph again), immigration difficulties (Abraham), loss of a spouse (Ruth) or child (Adam), natural disaster (Job), and countless other real-life hardships.
But each of these experienced their families’ stories written toward breathtaking ends by an author with redemption in mind. Their brokenness served as a path to the restoration and intimacy (with each other, with God) they truly craved.
Part of the potentially shocking wow-factors in any family are the forgiveness, the perseverance through the ugly and sore, the patience, and the need to reach toward each other over mountains of humanness.
In contrast, a lot of people who would think themselves moral don’t know how to interact with the broken, the washed-up, the addicted, the promiscuous. But Jesus did.
I’ve found the world needs my “perfect” family a lot less than it needs Jesus. A family well aware of how much they need Jesus is far more compelling than the one glad they’re not like those families (Luke 18:9-12). In fact, sometimes my “good example” has shellacked over my own brokenness more than truly dealing with the deep evil and distance from God within me.
More than simply moral, perfect families, society is compelled by families who know how to travel through people’s brokenness with them—because they’ve traveled deeply through their own.
Can our families empathize? Can they listen well? Are they full of an irresistible, genuine humility? Can they connect with a world Jesus loved?
God saves us to restore our families to Himself, to reconcile a lost relationship. It’s foundational to the ways we all see our society crumbling.
And it’s what a bleeding world with broken priorities needs far more than “having it all.”
Janel Breitenstein is an author, freelance writer, and speaker. After five and a half years in East Africa, her family of six returned to Colorado, where they continue to work on behalf of the poor with Engineering Ministries International. To learn more about Janel, visit janelbreitenstein.com.
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