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Kristi Schliep

kristi.schliep@yfci.org

JUNE 2024

I have been given a rare gift this year. It is pretty unusual these days for people to live in proximity to their whole immediate family. We call ours the Schmireles 12. Yet this year, I lived within a mile and a half of my parents, siblings, nieces and nephews. I walked to their houses. I ate meals with them. I attended church with them. We celebrated birthdays and holidays together. I came alongside them in school, basketball coaching, and ministry. We prayed together, played games together, cried together, and laughed together. For thirteen months, I have lived life with those who share my blood and my story.

The Schmireles 12

So as we approach my parents’ 50th wedding anniversary on June 8 and my return to Germany on June 25, I am reflecting on this gift of family. We are not a perfect bunch of people. Like any family, we can be sources of heartache and pain for one another. It is learning to love well within this broken, imperfect family that has convinced me of the inherent contradiction of the current trend towards “chosen family.”

Family is a source of pain for so many people. The people who were called to love us, celebrate us, give us a solid foundation, fail to do so to varying degrees. We may try to compensate for broken family relationships by sewing together “chosen families.” When we do this, we testify to the burned-into-our-soul need for whole, healthy, redeemed, fulfilled family relationships. We are designed for family, even single people. But choosing family that “gets” us, that agrees with us, that is easy, may miss part of the point of family.

God described His Church as a family. While many of us have options about what local expression of church we get to attend, we don’t get to make that choice for the others who are part of that community. So as followers of Jesus, we find ourselves in a new family, a family we were born into by water and Spirit. We didn’t choose this family any more than we chose the family of our human birth. We find ourselves living in community with people who hurt us and who complicate our lives.

The same relational muscles that get exercised with the Schmireles 12 are the muscles I must exercise within my spiritual family. These include forgiveness, celebration, lament, grace, speaking the truth in love, vulnerability, and delight.

I am grateful for the ways my natural family continues to be a community where I learn to love and be loved. I enjoy these people greatly, not because they are perfect, but because we belong to one another. This is a beautiful invitation for me when I think about my spiritual family. I learn to enjoy them and love them, not because they are perfect, but because we belong to one another.

My prayer is that I will take what I’ve learned in living in proximity to the Schmireles 12 this past year and find new ways to live as spiritual family in Kandern, both within BFA and in my local church. These are the people I belong to in this season. They are the people I can live out Romans 12:9-21 (and many other passages) alongside. Thanks for joining me in praying that I would love my family, both natural and spiritual, the way Jesus loves me.

Kristi Schliep