Say to wisdom, “You are my sister,” and to insight, “You are my relative.” – Proverbs 7:4

Today’s Scripture Reading (August 21, 2016): Proverbs 7

Actor Oliver Hudson apparently once commented that “Blood relatives often have nothing to do with family, and similarly, family is about who you choose to make your life with.” Cynically, I have often wondered what the background might have been to the comment. I mean, there seems, on the outside, to be a lot to celebrate among his blood relatives. Oliver is the son of Goldie Hawn and musician Bill Hudson, although he was raised by Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell. He is the brother of Kate Hudson. And if you shake his family tree a little you will find other actors, successful business people and professional sports players hanging off of the various branches. His pedigree would seem to be on a secure footing. So what exactly is he trying to tell us?

Having said that, I get that it is the ending of a story that we might want to tell. It is the plot line to Mary Ann Evan’s (writing under her more familiar pen name of George Eliot) classic novel “Silas Marner.” As Eppie grows older, she is given a chance to leave her adopted father, Silas, for the power and money of her real father, Godfrey Cass. But by the time that Godfrey is ready to admit that he is Eppie’s father, it is too late. Eppie has already accepted Silas as her father. And she has no desire to trade him for the fantasy that is her blood dad.

Deep down we want that ending. But there is another side. When I was young, my aunt gave me a book so that I could understand my two adopted cousins. The book was called “The Search to Belong” and it told the story of a young man who, even though he was adopted into an excellent family, felt a need to know more about who the family was that existed somewhere out there and had been involved in the moment of his birth. It is a desire that I have seen in a lot of adopted kids. It is not that they want to exchange their adoptive families for their blood relatives. But they have a deep desire to at least be able to identify who their father and mother, and their brothers and sisters really are. They have questions that can be only answered by the ones who are biologically related to them.

Maybe this is more the emphasis of this passage. Too often we have exchanged wisdom and insight for adopted relatives. But deep down we need to understand that we spring from wisdom and insight. Our blood is mixed with their blood. Maybe, for a while, we have lost focus on that. But wisdom and insight exist in the place where we belong; they are our roots and roots to which we need to return. Wisdom and insight are our blood which we need to reflect. This is who we really are, and even if it is not the story that is told by our daily lives – it could be. In this case, it is time that we rejoined our blood relatives and leave behind us the adopted family to which we have become accustomed.

   

Tomorrow’s Scripture Reading: Proverbs 8