Monday, March 28, 2016

Sweet or Spicy

So you know how much I love Jen Hatmaker. My book study group is doing the For the Love Book Club on Faith Gateway right now and we're having a ball. It's so refreshing to do a book study where the object of the book is to give ourselves and each other grace in a world of unrealistic standards.

There's a chapter in For the Love where Hatmaker talks about two types of families: sweet or spicy. Now, there's a lot of overlap here, but I think she's right--most families trend toward one or the other of these identities. You know the sweet families: matching outfits, smiling faces, nary a raised voice or disobedient child, can sing church hymns in harmony, able to remain still for the duration of a meal. 
And I'm sure you've noticed the spicy ones: visible tattoos, volume and intensity cranked to 11, "personality", moving at lightning speed, love-hard-fight-hard, lots of big feelings.

 Not sure which category this fits into.  

We can probably see a little bit of ourselves in both groups, but here's the kicker: doesn't it always seem like we want our family to be more of the group that we aren't?  Why do we become so insecure about our own family when we see another behaving well? We all know that that family has their own issues when they're behind closed doors, so why do we buy into the lie that they're somehow better than us?

If we were able to watch ourselves on a hidden camera for a day I bet we'd be surprised at what an awesome job we're actually doing--plenty of I love you and physical contact and that's great honey, and let me help you with that and an extra piece of candy snuck in the lunch box and we'll do better tomorrow. But we tend to exaggerate our weaknesses and downplay our strengths. As a general rule, people who think they're doing a terrible job at something are probably doing just fine.

Is your family sweet or spicy? What is one characteristic from the opposite group that you admire? What is one characteristic that you wouldn't give up for anything?

1 comment:

  1. We are spicy all the way here. Last week when I went to see Jill Savage speak she talked about how we all wear mask and we need to remember to let people see us with our mask off so we don't fall prey to the perfection infection. No one is perfect except for Christ and if he can keep him in the center of it all we will be headed in the right direction.