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by Lisa McIntosh
What makes a group of individuals a family? Being related by blood or marriage? How about definition 7 in the Macquarie Dictionary: ‘a group of persons who form a household and who regard themselves as having familial ties’?
Is our understanding of family more to do with shared lives and values than being ‘descended from a common progenitor’, as definition 4 states? Jesus certainly takes a more inclusive view of family, as we are reminded in this month’s Bible study (see John 19:26,27 and Matthew 12:49,50).
TJ Krause was almost four when he and his younger brother Abebaw (AJ) came from an orphanage in Ethiopia to become part of a new family in Australia.
Now 20 and an apprentice carpenter, he still remembers the feeling he had meeting his new mum, Julie, for the first time and, ultimately, his new siblings and, later, his new dad, Jonathan. Each of his parents also has children from previous marriages.
‘It was really exciting, and it was rather interesting and bizarre and surreal’, TJ says of the experience of meeting and joining a new family, who now live at Maslin Beach in South Australia. ‘We don’t call it “blended” but it is a blended family.’ He says that even though there are particular challenges to being part of a family in which members come from different backgrounds, the best element is that ‘there’s no judgement whatsoever’.
‘We all make it work really well, and Mum and Dad are just super accepting. When you’re younger and you don’t know where your real parents are, sometimes you question that.
‘But you do realise that the parents you have really do love you and they cherish you and protect you. That makes you realise that they are your real parents even though they’re not blood.
‘I think family keeps you motivated to keep pursuing life because you’re showing them that you’re grateful for the opportunities they’re giving you. A family’s always there to love you, support you, be there for you through thick and thin, and there’s nothing that can beat unconditional love.
‘If someone’s willing to support someone else throughout every single thing and be there for them through the good and bad, that’s the definition of family, whether it’s your brother or it’s your best mate.’
Blending two families and households into one challenges parents, too, with things such as setting disciplinary boundaries, territorial feelings and behaviour, different parenting styles and basic practical issues all requiring attention.
Pastor Mark and Beth Kaesler, of Seaford in South Australia, merged two households into one when they were married. Between them, they had four children from their previous marriages, including two sons named Paul!
‘It’s a funny thing when you join two families and two houses’, Beth says. ‘You don’t mean to be, but you’re quite threatened about trying to maintain territory. When Mark, Elisa and Paul moved in, there was all this sorting about what we would throw out and what we’d keep. You know, like, whose egg flip will we keep? It was very, very territorial.
‘When you get past that physical territorial stuff, then you have to move on to the emotional territorial stuff and spiritual territorial stuff. You know, like, I’ll give a bit here and you give a bit. And I think we learned fairly early that we both had to give a lot more than 50 per cent to make it work.’
Both Beth and Pastor Mark say that God’s support was critical in blending their families.
‘God is part of everything, really’, Pastor Mark says. ‘God is never absent. He is speaking to us in all sorts of ways. And I guess you really can’t put a value on all those little bits of knowledge that he gives you in this journey.’
‘I think it starts with a sense and an understanding of how much God has given you and how much God has forgiven you’, Beth adds. ‘That gives you a huge sense of God’s grace which you can then give out.’
And they agree that God is the one in their family who can best break down the barriers that members may put up for their own feeling of safety and security.
God is also central to the family life of Pastor Colin Simpkin, his wife Tanya, son Brad and niece Abbie Williams, of Grovedale in Victoria. Abbie became part of the family household after the death of her mother, Joanne, Tanya’s sister, as her father is not able to look after her.
The Simpkins say they always wanted two children and believe that God had plans for them to be ‘a complete family with Abbie’.
‘With Brad being an only child, Abbie coming into our family brought him a sibling and he learnt how to share everything – toys, home and parents’, Pastor Colin says. ‘As a family, we miss one another when any are away. We have the joy of seeing the accomplishments of the others. We have brought God into Abbie’s life and we learn a lot from her, too.
‘Having all of the members of our family now has added extra love into each of our lives. Abbie loves having a female role model and support person, and Tan is what Abbie needs to guide her through many difficult areas.’
Pastor Colin says that while there were challenges for each of them in getting used to the new family dynamics, the family unit is really important to them ‘because God put us together’.
‘Everybody needs to know they belong somewhere and that they matter to others. God is love and we know his love through Jesus, who calls us to pass that love on to our families.’
You can read more of Beth and Mark’s story, or listen to their Messages of Hope interview at www.messagesofhope.org.au/blended-families/
The COVID-19 pandemic has so dominated the lives of many Australians and New Zealanders at home for the past 18 months that it’s been easy to forget that around the world people are suffering who need our prayers.
But Peter Gerang Deng has not forgotten the troubles and tragedies of his homeland of South Sudan in north-eastern Africa. South Sudan is a diverse nation of more than 60 major ethnic groups, which has long been wracked by civil wars, violence, political instability and natural disasters, which have displaced millions of people and left many others living in poverty. Peter, who like his wife Rebecca Manyang is from South Sudan’s Denka ethnic group, is an educator and an elder at Immanuel Lutheran Church in North Adelaide. The couple has three children, who have all been born in Australia, and is expecting a fourth child.
Concerned that local people were no longer aware of needs beyond their own restrictions and borders, Peter raised the issue with Immanuel’s pastor, Rev Dr Mark Worthing. ‘He said, “Pastor, can we do something to encourage people to pray for South Sudan? With everything else going on in the last year, people have forgotten the needs there’, Pastor Mark explains.
‘So, the next week Peter made a presentation to the congregation about the needs in South Sudan. Afterwards, people said we should do more to focus on this. Someone else said it would be nice to get families involved and make it an intergenerational effort. That’s how the “November Family Prayer Challenge”, with its focus on South Sudan, came about.’
With the backing of the congregation’s Grow Team, Peter and Pastor Mark launched the month-long prayer challenge on 24 October, giving out laminated guides so that members, along with their families and friends, were ready to start the innovative program the following Sunday. The guides were also sent out via email
and are available on the congregation’s website.
While prayer was pivotal to the program, there were three key elements of the challenge each week for four weeks for those taking part – learn, pray, act.
‘We wanted to encourage everyone to learn more about the current situation and needs in South Sudan, to pray for its people, and to explore ways to concretely help
the situation there’, Pastor Mark says. ‘We also wanted to encourage people to do this as families, or with a friend or group of friends, either within or outside of our congregation.’
The prayer challenge linked in with Australian Lutheran World Service, which supports aid and development projects in South Sudan, and which provided Immanuel with a guest speaker to help raise awareness about its ongoing work and partnerships in Africa.
Peter, who became a teacher through Lutheran World Federation at Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya, where he met Rebecca, said the prayer challenge was helping to raise awareness locally of the ‘chaotic’ situation in South Sudan, even though the country was technically in ‘peacetime’ after multiple civil wars.
He says when people have a greater awareness of a situation, they then can pray and understand how best to do something to support people in need. ‘[We have a saying that] if you want to help somebody, don’t give them a fish, give them a hook or a net to go and feed themselves’, he says. ‘Give them something to do beyond war.
‘Despite having no war now, there’s something called negative and positive peace. There may be peace there – no guns going throughout the country – but there are pockets of instability going on.
‘I often speak to elders at North Adelaide who came from Germany after World War II. They share their stories of when they arrived here. They think they are no longer refugees but when people talk about refugees and what they face, it’s something they can relate to easily. Now they have a better picture of the people of South Sudan.’
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