A MOBILE

Don’t you love to see a perfectly balanced mobile gently moving as a breeze passes – one piece turning, the whole mobile adjusting to the new movement? To me it is an excellent picture of what a family should be. Each piece perfectly connected to each other but not so close that each can’t spin on its own. Each member in balance with the rest yet the others naturally adjusting as one is moved by a new breeze. The new breeze may be a new job, a new year in school, a sport, an illness, a child being born into the family, a child going off to college – the list is endless. Yet with each new breeze the family adjusts and moves in beauty that others admire. There are some families though, that are like a tangled, jumbled mobile. Maybe too big of a wind came blowing through. Rather than being delicately suspended they now find themselves flat on the floor with little hope of spinning freely again. And just like the fallen mobile others see it as messy. It would take so much work and so much time to fix. Instead, it is unceremoniously discarded into a drawer to be dealt with some other time. In doing so, pieces and connections get more and more tangled, and now they are in total darkness with no hope. Some day someone may open that drawer and see the jumbled mess and instead of carefully taking it out and restoring it they shove something else in the drawer only adding to the wreckage. Sometimes there are individuals in a family that don’t understand that they are connected to the whole. They don’t realize that the mobile – nor the world – doesn’t revolve around them. The family is set out of balance and is constantly struggling to set itself right. There are some families that are too tight. They allow no freedom of movement. Their strings are too short. When one member tries to move it butts up against another, and stops. The individual and the family become stagnant. There are several passages in the Bible that speak to this idea. Just as a body, though one, has many parts, but all its many parts form one body, so it is with Christ. . . . But in fact God has placed the parts in the body, every one of them, just as he wanted them to be. . . . Now you are the body of Christ, and each one of you is a part of it. I Corinthians 12:1, 18, 27 Rejoice with those who rejoice; mourn with those who mourn. Live in harmony with one another. Romans 12:15 -16a May we remember that it is God who created us and placed us just where he wanted us to be. May we hang together, with Christ as our common thread and may we respond as the Holy Spirit, who is sometimes referred to as a wind, gently moves us. And for those we see in a tangled heap on the floor, may we take the time and with the compassion of Christ gently bring them back into balance.