Awkward family gatherings on this edition of Truth and Love.

I'm Heath Lambert and you're listening to Truth and Love, a podcast of the Association

of Certified Biblical Counselors, where we seek to provide biblical solutions to the problems that

people face. It is that time of year again. Christmas trees are going up in the stores. People are

headed to attics all over the world to pull out boxes of decorations that they haven't seen in the last 11

months. People are pulling out recipes for

stuffing and the smell of turkey is permeating the air. It's the holiday season, of course. It's

that famous time of year that's marked off by the celebration of Thanksgiving and Christmas,

and that means one very important thing, and that is that we are

all about to go to some very awkward family gatherings. You know what I'm talking about, if you're

honest. At least once a year, we all have to get dressed up, plaster a smile on our face,

and consume vats of cranberry salad with people that we spend one meal a year with because of a faint connection in our genetic code.

We're going to listen to great aunts describe their medical trouble, to mothers-in-law complain that the yeast rolls we've served

aren't as good as theirs, and we'll have to nod with pretend interest as our second cousins

twice removed describe in painstaking detail the frustrations day experience from coworkers in the next

cubicle. And these are the easy interactions. We haven't gotten to the really serious and often

truly painful engagements with estranged siblings, estranged parents, former spouses,

that some of us will engage after experiencing years of painful conflict.

We all have to spend time in these awkward gatherings,

and what I want to do on the podcast this week

is explain three biblical instructions,

three biblical texts that help us know how to navigate

...