I had a different editorial planned. It was about how Adventist families are founded on a covenant that has God at its center and that, as such, worshipping together in the family circle is imperative. Then my brother died.
He was only 44 years old. He had a young family with four children aged 10 and under. He died suddenly. We are all in shock.
I was the only one of my three other siblings to make it to his bedside before they turned off his ventilator. He was our only brother. My parents could not arrange for the required travel documents in time. They all watched over Zoom.
During the pandemic, as social isolation wreaked havoc on mental health worldwide, my extended family took to gathering every Friday for family worship. Because we were in the U.S., it was in the afternoon, and our family was busy with preparation while the rest of my family, in South Africa and Zimbabwe at the time, were well into the Sabbath hours. It took some strategizing to get my children to pause their play and sit in front of a laptop as we sang and told stories, taking turns for who would lead out each week. Often, particularly in the winter, I’d have to complete my preparation of the house by early afternoon to ensure that we would have our home ready by sundown. It required effort. It was worth it!
The Sabbath School lesson study was our go-to material for the children, and eventually for the adults as well. Seeing as it was their evening worship time, most times my brother and his family would lead out the children’s section of the worship. I got a sneak peek into how his family conducted their worship on a daily basis. His children knew what to do when it was time to pray (if they always did it is another matter entirely, but they’re children). All week long they had been committing their memory verse to memory (a practice we can all still benefit from), and my brother would invite all the children to share what they had learned. You could tell that worship wasn’t a one-off thing. It was part of his family’s DNA.
Being in his home now as I support his family through this challenging time, I can see how central their family worship experience is to their family identity. Aside from being a focused time of instruction, it is a time of spiritual fellowship—a time to form and solidify the family ties. I sat praying for God’s wisdom as in the warmth of the worship afterglow of singing, storytelling, and prayer my sister-in-love gently explained to the children that their father, who had been in the hospital for only one night, would not be coming home again. The space to have difficult conversations already existed through the practice of consistent family worship.
The pandemic gifted my family with the impetus to connect in worship on a weekly basis. As we, the adults, wrestled through texts in the adult Sabbath School lesson, we came to know each other better on a spiritual plane. As we shared prayer requests that we prayed over throughout the following week, our hearts were knit together with eternal ties. While I knew my siblings and parents were churchgoing Adventists, gathering together the way we did during the pandemic turned them into brothers and sisters in Christ. Although it is only God who can read the heart, I am not worried about my brother’s eternal destiny, because, through our times of family worship, I came to know him as a faithful Christian man.
The bonds formed through years of worship together are, in this time of grief, a source of comfort and strength. No one would wish this pain on another, but every Christian family deserves the consolation of close family ties rooted in the worship of a God who is faithful.