Family by design.
We live in a fallen world of imperfect people who create imperfect families. Yet, God designed the family to illustrate for us our relationship to Him. He knew we couldn't achieve perfection in any of our endeavors without His intervention, but does that mean we give up? According to the world, we should just cut out "toxic" people from our lives and abandon anyone who "doesn't make us happy." I agree that dangerously abusive people need to be removed from our lives as expediently as possible. That doesn't mean we should cut ties with family members with whom we simply disagree or that we shouldn't be willing to welcome back those who walked away over some disagreement.
That's exactly what God does with us. We may decide at different times in our lives that He is not worth the trouble of getting to know, that He doesn't understand us or even truly know or care that we exist. We may even decide that He does not exist. That doesn't mean we can't come home again. He's always there, ready, willing, and able to re-establish communication, to take us under His protective wing and grow the ties that bind us.
A very real movement is afoot to destroy the family. Some believe it is a danger to personal freedom, new ways of thought, and re-educating the masses to necessary revolutionary ideas, one of which is removing the idea of God from the human psyche. Only by removing God as the originator of true liberty and the arbiter of good and evil can human power brokers fully usurp those positions for themselves--and make no mistake; that is the goal. They do this under the guise of equality, but the truth is that, like all humans, they will show favoritism to those who agree most with them, and their judgment will be just as flawed as every one else's.
Only God's design has a chance of working, and it works best when we follow His teaching. When we move away from that, we inevitably mess up. It's just human nature. Thank God for His design!
