Wild and Wonderful, Pt. 2

Part 0 (Summer in the Mountains) — Part 1 (Say Uncle) — Part 2 (Family… Sorta?)
— Part 3 (Fireflies)

Family Ties

Sometimes it’s weird being around Cassie’s relatives. There are just so many reminders of my late wife. Even for the ones not related by blood, there’s so many similarities and little quirks that are shared across the family. Though there is one person in particular who has so many of the same attributes as Cassie—her cousin, Bria Wasson. She has the same wit, the same concern for others, the same commitment to ministry, the same contagious joy, the same love for family, the same weird quirkiness, and she has the same way of laughing at her own jokes.

Back in 2016, Bria had come down from Ohio with her husband and children to visit her Florida relatives and to have fun at the theme parks. Though I didn’t, Cassie had the time to go to Disney with them. All I remember is Cassie and Bria constantly poking at each other and laughing hysterically at each other’s jokes (mostly because they were the only ones in the room who thought they were funny).

Detour

While already in West Virginia, my parents decided it would be a great idea to head just a couple hours further north and visit Amish Country in Ohio. But funny thing about the towns they wanted to see, they were just a few minutes from where Cassie’s wonderful cousin Bria and her family lived. With only a little notice, I found myself spending a couple days with the Wasson clan.

And it was so much fun! It’d be great to just write about how much I enjoyed spending time with them. We shared meals. We stayed up laughing at movies. We worshiped together at their awesome church. We hiked around a park nearby. And we just hung out. Almost like we were family or something.

My Family, Our Family, His Family

I’ve already mentioned in other posts that Cassie and I, being a young couple, were looking forward to growing a family of our own. When we got married, it was still pretty much just the two of us in love. Then we got a dog which made our apartment feel like a home, and which made our relationship feel more like a small family than a couple of people. And as already mentioned, we were beginning to make plans to try for a baby in the next year. Truthfully, a part of my identity was wrapped up in this feeling and hope of family-hood.

Since Cassie passed, I’ve been unsure how to cope with that particular feeling of loss—the loss of identity. I went from being a man with a teeny-tiny family to being just a guy with a dog, from building a family to missing a wife, and from dreaming of a future to dreaming of the past. But it was people like Bria who helped with that aspect of grief the most. Though I’m sure they didn’t do it intentionally.

I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named.

Ephesians 3

You can’t tell in English, but the Apostle Paul is making a play on words here. “Father” is the Greek word Pater- and “family” is the Greek word patria. It’d be like saying, “Jesus, the Word of God, the Alpha and Omega, from whom every alphabet gets its purpose.” Paul’s point is that our sense of being in a family, our understanding of what a family is and even our aspirations for what our own family could be, they all derive from the relationship that God established with his creation. He assumed the role of Father, of our heavenly parent. Any family we make will always be secondary to that family he made. Any family we dream of will just be a foggy reflection of the relationships we already have in him and in his church.

I don’t plan to be a husband again, and it still hurts my heart to think of when I wanted to be a father. Those titles and those identities have been ripped away. But deep down I know that they were always secondary to something greater. Any sense of meaning those relationships could have provided was derived from ones I already had. The God I believe in remains my heavenly Father. I remain his child. People like Bria, like Cassie’s parents, Cassie’s siblings and like the staff at Kissimmee Christian, they remain my brothers and sisters in Christ.

Pointing to his disciples, [Jesus] said, “Here are my mother and my brothers. For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother.”

Matthew 12

Bria is the daughter of the sister of the step-mother of my passed wife (and so the rest of her family who invited me into their home are removed a further step) and she lives almost exactly 1,000 miles away. There’s really no physical thing tying her family to me. But what bridges us together are those things made by God for his eternal family—a common faith, a common hope, a common love and the desire to express these in uncommon ways. As a result of the Wassons and so many other incredible people expressing those things, uncommon relationships have been made. I lost my identity as husband. But I’m finding my identity as I relate to God and to his children.

Part 0 (Summer in the Mountains) — Part 1 (Say Uncle) — Part 2 (Family… Sorta?)
— Part 3 (Fireflies)