United Families

This past weekend I was able to attend a family reunion on for my girlfriends family.  While attending and dealing with the one of the people that put the event together I learned a few things.  I learned that no matter what you go through and no matter what the discrepancies you are still family.  Family is one of the most important things in life.  Its essential to everything you stand for as an adult and everything you went through as a child.  These are the people that helped shape who you are and continue to lead you into the person you are gonna be.  We all have child hood stories of things that are cousins did or that crazy Aunt who always got on your nerves at family functions.  These are important people in your life and the bond that you will have with these people for the rest of your life can never be broken.  There are so many people in the world that write family off because of a misunderstanding or a fallout that they might have had, but when it's all said and done you can never write off the people that share the same blood line as you.  There are times in our lives when we feel like we can go on without certain people in our family, but those people are still people that at one point you loved dearly and can never be forgotten or erased.  It's so important that we as parents and as leaders of a newer yet better generation enforce on the youth the importance of family.  We need to let them know that keeping in touch with your loved ones is essential.  They must understand that a families bond can never be broken and will forever live on as long as the bloodline continues.  There are a lot of youth these days that will turn on their own brother for a quick buck, or rob their own mother if that means they can get high one more time.  These are the people that we cannot let our children turn into.  The moment your children does not care about their families will be the same time they will fail to care about anyone else but themselves.  Sometimes it's OK to want to do you and to not care if nobody else cares what you do, but you should never lose sight of family.  Whether it's an Aunt on your dad side that you do not talk to much, or a cousin that you got into a fight with when you were 14, or just a family member that you do not keep up with very often, we need to make sure that our family understands how we feel about them.
I make it a point to tell my closest friends who I consider family how much they mean to me and how much I consider them as part of my family, without that no one can truly understand the category they fit in.  Generations ago our ancestors understood the importance of family, they kept strong bonds and made sure that all family was taken care of we as people need to get back to that so that our younger generation understands the importance of sticking together as family and keeping the bond of their bloodline tight.