Excerpt from, “What a Friend We Have in Jesus” by Chieko N. Okazaki: ¹

I don’t think I’m going out very far on a limb to say that I know that you either have someone in your family with at least some of these problems or you know somebody has some these problems. This is what real families deal with the real world. And they don’t stop being families.

A divorced family is not a broken family. It’s a family with a particular set of circumstances that it needs to work with. A family with a gay child is not a failed family. It’s a family with a member who needs special love and understanding and who has love and understanding to give back. A family with a pregnant teenager is not a dysfunctional family. It’s a family with a complex set of decisions to make.