When I was 12, I experienced one of the most dramatic storms of my life. At the time we were living in the southern suburbs of Johannesburg. Dark clouds had been gathering for some time. Thunder had been rolling, and the flashes of lightning were getting closer together with each passing minute. We waited and waited and then suddenly the storm broke. The sky seemed permanently lit up by sheet and fork lightning. I wrapped my jersey tighter around me as the thunder boomed and cracked with enough force to rattle the windows. We sat huddled on the couch, staring out of the window as the hail began...it didn’t stop for at least half an hour.

By the time the storm abated, our garden had been transformed. Living on the South African Highveld, snow is not something we experience but suddenly everything was white! The ice had piled up in drifts against the walls. Our pool was a mass of floating hailstones, a few centimetres deep. My brother and I dressed up in a strange combination of whatever we hauled out of the cupboard first and set off to explore. We spent hours in the park down the road frolicking in this new landscape. And we weren’t alone! The drama of the storm had surpassed all other priorities and most people were outside assessing the damage.

This is just one of the countless memories I have with my family. A month ago I was fortunate enough to spend a week in the UK with my parents, brother, aunt and cousins. We always have a wonderful time together, with much playful banter. But serious discussions were also had and this led me to start pondering the nature of the family while I cruised above the clouds on my flight home.

The family is designed to be a support structure. It should be a network of relationships based on trust and respect. It is designed to be an environment that nurtures us. In our families we learn about ourselves and relationships. We teach, not just as parents, but as children to. We should be able to find acceptance in our families, regardless of circumstances. In some cases this is true. In too many, it is not.

I cannot think of a single family that doesn’t have issues of some kind. The very nature of the family means that it has the ability to hurt us the most. Our family members are closest to us and we are therefore at our most exposed and vulnerable in our relationships with them. Rifts in families can be caused by single events. A traumatic experience, an unexpected death, a betrayal of trust, a divorce, abuse of people, substances and power; all of these things can cause division. Far more insidious though are the conditions that arise over time.

In countless movies and books today, the main character is all ‘messed up’ because of family. While I don’t for a moment believe that families are the ’root of all evil’, I do think that a lot of our hang ups can be attributed to our interactions with our relatives. This is not because they are bad people; it is simply because they are probably the people who have the largest impact in our lives. If we consider the lifetime of experiences we’ve shared, we will see that there have been countless opportunities for the enemy to attack us. These footholds can be insignificant when they occur, but the key here is time. Like compound interest, the smallest seed of anger or bitterness can grow and spread until it has become an undercurrent for all our reactions towards individuals or circumstances.

To illustrate the point, I’d like to share a recent breakthrough that God guided me in. For the past few months, I found myself experiencing an inexplicable irritation towards a certain member of my family. I could not understand it as I love this person and really want to have a good relationship with her. I prayed about it and God showed me that it was rooted in an incident that happened 5 years ago. Because of it I distrusted this person since. In short, I was distancing myself and our relationship simply wasn’t growing. I hadn’t thought about this event for years, but when God opened my eyes to it I could clearly see that my irritation towards her was a result of a refusal to forgive on my part.

This brings me to the heart of it all. Our families have the biggest impact on who we develop into. In many ways this is positive but as we’ve seen, negative can creep in as well. It is therefore crucial that we practice forgiveness in the family context. We may try to build barriers but families are intrinsically linked. There will always be connections and if these are affected negatively, they can hold us back for our entire lives if we do not forgive.

Forgiveness is something that we need God to help us with. One of the reasons we struggle with it so much is because we think that by forgiving, we are letting the person off the hook. But here we come to the crux of the matter, because forgiveness is not an act of justice, it is an act of love. Firstly we need to ask God to show us the root of the problem. We then need to ask God to help us forgive that person. This will be a process. It will not happen overnight. But it will get easier if we consistently chose to forgive. And it will be much simpler if we ask God to fill us with His perfect love, that love which can transcend any wrong doing or injustice.

Hailstorms don’t happen often. There are a whole lot of factors that need to be present and working together before the right conditions are present. Firstly you need a huge cloud, packed full of water vapour particles which join together to form droplets. Then you need an updraft of air. This movement of air picks up the droplets and carries them up into the highest reaches of the cloud, where it is so cold that they freeze. The air then moves down the outside of the cloud, carrying the little frozen mass into comparative warmth. This causes more droplets to gather on the outside of the stone. Up it goes again, and this new layer freezes. Over and over this process occurs and layer upon layer, the hailstone gets bigger. And then suddenly the scale tips – the stone is now too heavy and gravity pulls it towards earth. It gathers speed as it falls and by the time it smacks into the ground, it has potential to do a lot of damage.

Every little incident in our past that we have failed to forgive can be thought of as a hailstone. Whenever we get together with family, these stones of unforgiveness gather until there is a huge cloud hanging over the gathering. We might all be smiling and laughing but there are undercurrents of trepidation, and little droplets are being added to those stones almost without us realising it. If the scales tip, destruction can result. But if we chose to forgive, consistently and repeatedly; if we ask God to fill our hearts with love, then we can dissipate this danger. Like the wind that scatters the storm clouds on the horizon, forgiveness removes the hailstones from our hearts, one at a time. And from there we can enjoy those Sunday afternoons with family that stretch out before us, under a banner of blue sky and sunshine!