Revelation 21:4 — And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away.

I had a phone call today, one part of which saddened me. It might be considered private and personal, so I can’t go into much detail but I can say that the sadness was about a family broken apart, and parents and children separated at Christmas.
As I thought about the fracture in that little family, my thoughts turned to all those other broken families spending separated Christmases. In America alone there are more than thirteen million single parents caring for more than twenty-four million children. Does that break your heart a little — it surely should.
I had another odd thought. God, it seems to me, is the Father of the largest fractured family of all.
Ever since the fall, every child ever born into God’s family has been separate from their heavenly Father from birth — and that’s the point of Christmas!
It’s a typical “God-style” plan. He chose to send His son — to separate Him — into another family, as a way to start the centuries-long process of repairing the fracture in His heavenly family.
It’s a funny thing. Sometimes it looks like Jesus’s family was an object lesson in how to succeed in raising a fractured family. For a start, there was that business of Mary’s baby. Do you think all the neighbors bought that “Holy Spirit” story?
After that bumpy start the family did seem to settle down for a bit … Although there was that funny business with Jesus getting left behind at the temple.
By the time Jesus started His ministry, Joseph was gone. Of course I’m not suggesting anything untoward … but for a while, maybe the family was without an accepted leader. The family really wasn’t behind the Lord in that ministry either.
O.K., maybe I’m stretching a point … but even Jesus’s genealogy might suggest that God’s plans are more than big enough for fractured families — remember Tamar, Rahab, Ruth and Bathsheba?
Somehow, despite all the bumps on the road, Jesus’s family turned out pretty well, especially brothers James and Jude!
So what am I concluding from all this? Well, one thing is that being in a broken family is not the end of the world. The other thing is that God has a big broken family too, and that’s not the end of the world either! He’s going to wipe all the tears away …