Food For Thought...
Love Makes A Family
When we’re free to love anyone we choose
When the world’s big enough for all different views
When we all can worship from our own kind of pews We shall be free.
Garth Brooks
When I heard that Bonnie Tinker had been killed in a bicycle accident on the Va Tech campus while attending the FGC Gathering, I was sorry to hear it even though I didn’t really know her. It wasn’t until later that I found out that although I didn’t even recognize her name she had touched my life in a very real way earlier in the week. On Monday evening Ruth and I were looking at the displays while we were waiting for the evening worship session with Shane Claiborne, and I saw the one entitled Love Makes A Family. It was full of pictures -pictures of single parent families, pictures of racially diverse families, pictures of families with special needs children, pictures of same sex couples with and without children. What I noticed in these pictures was the smiles, the happiness radiating from every one of them. Clearly these were all folks who loved one another deeply.
And in one of those rare moments of true understanding and clarity, I got it. It came home to me so suddenly, and yet so simply. Love is what makes a family. Love creates relationships and relationships create families. Love is the greatest power on earth, and what freedom is more basic than the freedom to love whoever we choose? I stopped for a moment and thanked God that I have been free to love and that no state or federal laws have inhibited my ability to do so. But what if that had not been the case? Could I or would I accept the idea that the state or the courts or anyone else could tell me my choice was not acceptable? Where does that whole notion of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” of which we’re so fond fit into this? Can people really pursue happiness if they’re not free to love?
Some would say people are free to love whoever they want, but there are a lot of limits on that freedom. I have known same sex couples who have been together 10-15, even 20+ years, but they haven’t been able to have any kind of ceremony to celebrate their commitment, or share health insurance, or even be allowed to make emergency medical decisions for one another without a power of attorney because they have no legal relationship. Somehow this freedom looks remarkably like the freedom African Americans used to have to stand in the back of the bus while white people sat in the front.
I picked up one of the little Love Makes A family stickers off their table and stuck it on my shirt. I wore it the rest of the week. In fact I was still wearing it on Friday morning when I found out that 61 year-old grandmother Bonnie Tinker had been one of the founders and guiding forces behind Love Makes A Family. So I never got to meet her or tell her what an impact her organization’s display had on me. I thought about Jesus’ words that “unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it abides alone.” I hope that Bonnie’s life and death will have real meaning and significance as a new harvest of folks step in to carry on this work to which she was so dedicated, and thanks to her efforts and those of others, there will come a day when we all come to understand that love and only love does make a family.