While I have not discovered anything shocking or revolutionary, one thing that has become apparent is that family history is a booming industry.
As it turns out, in recent years, there has been an enormous increase in people’s interest in their family’s story.
Whether this is expressed through DNA testing, the tracing of family trees, websites such as Ancestry.com or paid historians — people are gripped with the search for their family’s story.
As I’ve talked with people about this, I’ve discovered almost everyone I know is ‘digging into some family history’.
To me, this shows a common desire we have as a people, which is to know who we are, to know our identity.
And if you stop and think about it, this is really a lifelong endeavour.
It begins in our earliest years when children ask their parents or caregivers ‘Where did I come from?’ or ‘How was I made?’.
It continues when as older children and teenagers we ask questions like ‘Who I am?’, ‘What does it mean to be me?’ and ‘How can I express myself in light of who I am?’.
As adults, we take this journey of self-discovery further as we ask ourselves questions like ‘Why am I like this?’, ‘What are the events in life that have shaped me to be this way?’ ‘How did I get these problems?’ ‘What would I be like if things were different?’ and so on.
Each of us has this intrinsic desire to know ‘Where I have come from?’, ‘Why am I the way that I am?’ — ‘What is my story?’.
These same questions we ask ourselves privately are also the same questions that humans have asked about their collective experience for centuries.
However, while these questions are expressed differently, they are ultimately the same questions. ‘How did we come into existence?’, ‘What is our place in the world?’, ‘What does it mean to be human?’, ‘How do we live in such a way that we flourish and find fulfilment?’.
The Christian faith speaks to these questions by helping us to discover our story — our collective family history.
In Ephesians, the apostle Paul writes that God is ‘the Father from whom every family in heaven and on earth derives its name’.
What does Paul mean by this? In the time of Paul, to know your father meant to know where you came from, and in a similar manner, to share your father’s name (or last name) identified and intertwined your life to theirs.
Which means that when Paul says that God is the ‘father from which every family derives its name’, he is stating that the collective human existence is intimately connected to and ultimately understood in the story of God.
This means to discover God is to discover who you are, what you were made for and why. When we discover God, we discover our identity.
When we understand the story of God, we understand ourselves.
Through this, we can begin to discover how we can experience fulfilment and express the full extent of what it means to be human.
And more than this, the apostle Paul writes that it is through connection to God that we find the fulfilment we all long for — relationship with our Heavenly Father.
So where do we go to discover these things?
Well, later on in the same passage, Paul says that we know the fullness of God and his love for us through his son, Jesus Christ.
If you are wondering why we are here, how we got here and how to find fulfilment in life, the Christian faith will take you on a journey to discover who you are and who you were made to be.
Rev Jacob Kelly
St Andrew’s Anglican Church, Kyabram
10°C