What Does It Take to be a family?

We should learn to live together as brothers or we shall perish together as fools.

Author: Dushime O. Yabes

Well it wouldn’t be absolutely true to say from a personal state that I know a lot about “the family business” but the truth is we all are teachers of one another so correctly, there to help and learn form each other at all moments.

More so, isn’t that what Jesus said on the second great commandment in “The revised believers’ panel edition” that;

“Love your neighbor as you love yourself!”

To a stronger stand, we find the teachings of love, devotion and you know all the other good things to do for each other in any sort of relationship be it a friendship, a romance, brotherly love in Christ at the top-most in a FAMILY.

At the centre of every word from the mouth not only of Christ but other influential people and game changers of both local societies and the world at large to mention but only one; Martin Luther King Jr. Always referred the black and white folks as “brothers”.

Quoting one of his sayings and actually my favorite and everyday driving quote he said, “We should learn to live together as brothers or we shall perish together as fools”.

This isn’t so much different from what the largest influential book of the world says in its writings that are believed to have been inspired by the Supreme being, God. The scriptures say;

“Those who bring trouble on their families inherit the wind.” Proverb 11:29 a)

It takes solidarity, a strong unification, loving, caring, endurance, support and other essentials for one to belong to a family and the lack of these be the in and outflow of the essentials causes of the largest number of conflicts, violence, homicides, suicides and distort of the societies today.

Is this really what we want for our communities, societies, countries and our world at large?

The enormity of this tragedy is that it all starts with what we all call “smaller issues” not knowing that return on investment is ever expected to be bigger than the initials.

We tend to see these things as if they don’t count or maybe they are personal consequences, dealings, affairs, or whatever thing it is to be dubbed.

So it pushes people from us and make them entirely another entity yet they belong to us, bear our last names at worst they may still be living with us under the same roof.

There is this one time at our house, our young brother got a flea infection yes jiggers to be more real in English than in science.

It did happen and we all were in shock like its seeing the most horrible thing you have ever seen in your entire life.

Not learning that there lies a possibility of infections for jiggers to happen, matters went very far that we offended him with words to prove him the dirtiest, made fun of him and all sorts of evil doing.

At the moment, no one ever realized and ever bothered to question the why but rather how it happened. We rushed to get him treatment and thank God it was still early to be infectious to the rest of us.

I couldn’t imagine what this little fella was going through but what I could tell he started behaving like no one cared, always alone and wow to get him close was almost impossible because of the devastation he felt.

It didn’t only cost us that time without our young brother but also the reputation, who from our neighborhood would believe that a son from such a family would get a diseases that most take to be a result of poor hygiene, what in the world did that sound like ?

But the truth is, we had played a big role in any of the two to come our way. Had we fought together as a family, embraced secrecy rather than public mocking and making fun of our very own, there wouldn’t have been turn backs on us from both our little brother and distort of reputation of hygiene at the house that looked so fine to get that.

More so, we did turn our backs on each other too, our parents blamed everyone for not caring about anything not even our own little ones at all and yet everyone always put an effort and now where was it, but frankly, wasn’t it there?

It is just because we didn’t want to be attached to this problem and we had to get what we had created for ourselves.

I know that’s probably not a good story to share but I hope that we could learn from it how to be there for each other at all times so that in case any thing rises we are not to give room for any misconceptions, misunderstandings and turn-backs that may despise all our effort in doing good.

With family, we are ought to stand together, be there to help each other, compliment and rebuke each other in great secrecy and maintain our personal profiles and effort in everything we do so that we are not brought to shame together just because of something that “no body needs to know about”.

Because of our calling to serve a bigger purpose than us, we are ought to start from our homes because then we shall be more prepared to even reach out to others for we shall have learned the fundamentals and essentials of this big purpose.

These things we learn from home like less self-centeredness, teamwork, love for everyone and many others; they lay foundation to building in us great and more responsible people with changed families and with these we are so assured that our communities and societies are ready for a greater impact that is LOVE FOR EVERYONE!

“ Hatred stirs up quarrels but love makes up for all offenses” ~ King Solomon