Part 1

I just got back from the Worsham family reunion.  There are eight kids in my family, 20 grandkids and over 20 great grandkids.  The patriarch and matriarch of our clan, our father and mother, have both passed on.  We held our first official family reunion in 1980.  Our oldest sister and her family had settled in Florida in 1969, and my wife and I, along with our first newborn, had moved to Colorado in 1979.  We decided to plan and formalize our reunions and spend a few nights together every other year, rather than just trying to get lucky and hope we’d be in from Florida and Colorado at the same time and be able to meet with all the other siblings.  That first reunion was held at a Christian Camp.  We met a few other places over the years and finally settled for the Lake Texoma Lodge Cabins and RV Park in southern Oklahoma.  We met every other year and later began to meet every year.  The dates and length of the reunion have varied but we’ve stayed consistent through the years.  Sadly, we lost our meeting place three years ago when the state closed the lodge down and sold the property to a private developer.  We think we’ve found another place we can work with.

Our family has changed a lot over the years.  Yeah, the kids have grown up and my siblings and I have certainly gone from one side of the hill to the other, if you know what I mean.  But, the real changes have come in the personal growth of us all as individuals and as families.  As I’ve noted in previous entries, our high school-educated, country parents successfully directed all eight children to get educated or trained.  And, each had to pretty much pay his/her own way through work and financial aid.  Suffice it to say, none of us lived “high on the hog.”  Anyway, seven have bachelor’s degrees and six have master’s degrees.  There are no divorces among the eight kids, and all are Christians.  My parents had a vision for their kids to be college-educated and to not have to do the kinds of hard work that my father had to do.   It happened.

For my father’s funeral, I wrote a eulogy called “Bridge Over Troubled Water.”  Yeah, I stole that name, but it made my point.  The point was that my dad had lived through some tough years—the Great Depression, two world wars as well as the Korean War, and the last part of the Industrial Revolution.  He came from a line of alcoholics and pretty troubled people, but he got us over that troubled water and put us on more solid ground.  He was our bridge over the troubled waters of his times.  How could we not do likewise for our own kids?   Really, we just sort of instinctively did it.

At the reunion, we had a devotional one of the evenings in which my older brother played his acoustic guitar and another brother led us in old hymns we’d sung growing up.  Then, one of my nephews played his guitar and led us in contemporary praise songs that our youngsters would know.  Then I shared with the younger ones about building a family legacy, followed by each of my siblings sharing additional thoughts of their own.  I think we were all touched and moved as the family patriarchs  and matriarchs shared their own important messages about family, messages learned on the anvil of challenging life experiences.

My first point was to rhetorically ask the question Jesus asked his apostles after washing their feet (John 13:12-15), “Do you understand what I [we] have done for you?”  I asked it to make the point, that just like the apostles they didn’t understand yet, I’m sure most of them didn’t either.  And , to not understand it is to fail to appreciate and value it.  I followed that with the same challenge Jesus gave the apostles, “I [we] have set you an example that you should do as I [we] have done.”  Our children were raised in a family.  A real family.  We learned over the years, much through simple trial-and-error, to give each other the independence to live our respective lives as we felt called to do.  We didn’t have to live next door to each other and we didn’t have to spend every holiday together and we didn’t have to notify the rest of our every move.  Of course, we generally kept in touch, but we each did what we felt we had to do.  We learned we didn’t have to like it but we did need to respect it.  Certainly, not all have walked the narrow path we came to believe in ourselves (and we all made our own missteps as well).

But, we also grew to know that when tragedy struck or needs arose, we’d close ranks and “show up.”  We’d be there.  Mostly just to make sure the others knew we really cared, because often there was little that we could do beyond that.  I have deeply etched, painful memories of sitting in the hospital room of my dying 3 year-old niece, hearing her call out for “Deano”, the endearing name she called her daddy, my oldest brother.  She’d been diagnosed with acute leukemia and survived only a few months.  She died that night.  I was about 13 years-old and I had an awful stomach virus but I, along with the rest of the family, spent the night at Children’s Hospital in Oklahoma City sitting around helplessly to make our point.  We’ve since come together to bury our dad as well as other babies, aunts, uncles, all our grandparents, and even our one of our own grown children.  We’ve always showed up.
(continued in Part 2 in another entry)