Christ My Inheritance And My Legacy
Mother’s Day is this Sunday and many churches will likely acknowledge the important role the various types of moms play in our lives. I became a mother when I was 22. I was unmarried and the pregnancy was not planned. As you might imagine I dreaded telling my family the news. I was particularly afraid of telling my own mother, not because we had a bad relationship, or because I feared her condemnation, but because she herself became a mother at a young age. Though she was married to my father, their marriage lasted only a short time. She knew acutely the difficulties of young parenting in the midst of family brokenness.
No parent wants to watch his or her own child struggle, much less repeat the missteps of previous generations. Worldly wisdom seems to suggest this type of repeating pattern is inevitable. Sayings like, “The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree,” and “like father, like son” come to mind. Perhaps to some degree, this is true, after all, we share DNA with our biological parents and the degree of influence our DNA has over our behavior is still largely unknown. The field of epigenetics, along with other aspects of DNA, explores the manner in which a person's life experiences may influence the way his or her genetic coding is expressed. For example, my father was a child during the Great Depression. (Yes, really.) Epigenetics might explore to what degree would his experiences of being a child in Kansas during the scarcity of the 1920s and 30’s impact his DNA. And then how would those genes affected by my father’s experiences express themselves in me and his 3 other children? Would we, as my dad was prone to do, collect bits of string and containers, and small bits of scrap metal? In addition to genetics we also have one of the classic questions of psychology: Are human beings the product of nature (our genetic inheritance) or nurture (the influence of external factors after conception)? Most practitioners in these fields agree– it’s some combination of all of the above.
So, does this mean we are fated to repeat our family histories?
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