The Pain of a Family Divided by Miles

The Pain of a Family Divided by Miles
Genesis 31:30-54

When my wife and I started dating and then wanted to get engaged, her parents were totally against it. They had some plausible reasons. I was a long-haired lout (it was the 1960s), and they weren’t sure I was the kind of man they wanted to entrust their daughter to. But there was something else going on. They were very proud of their medical-student daughter, their only child, who had been the focus of their life. When she finished training, they imagined she would come back to her hometown to practice, bearing their name. Like her contemporaries, she would likely not have gone back to her hometown to practice, even if I had not come along, but they saw me as the villain who ensured it was not going to happen. What is more, I was a pastor. Fancy a doctor marrying a mere pastor! While in the long term the increasing effects of Ann’s multiple sclerosis were the balm that brought healing to the relationships, in the short term it was the birth of children that led to some measure of healing. My father-in-law lived just long enough to hold both his grandsons and to watch them (or at least the older one) play with toys and play on the beach and kick a ball...