12 - Cousins

This is my family. No, there are no cousins in the picture but I thought it would be a good visual anyways. I am the 5th of 10 kids in my family. This is a picture of my parents, brothers and sisters, and my nieces and nephews.

I have some cousins that I am close to and some cousins that I rarely see. Cousins are a strange relationship to me. Brothers and sisters, even if they are really close to you in age, are going to be at least in a different grade and have a different circle of friends. Normal friends that you have no relation to are kept because you grow up with them. Either you live in the same community, school boundary, or go to the same church. Cousins, however, can grow up in a completely different town, country, continent, school district, and culture...yet your friendship is more or less expected. Cousins are a testament to the fact that anybody, if they want to, can get along. I have a cousin that I didn't always get along with. He was older than me, cooler than me, and for the longest time I felt like I was just annoying to him (and I probably was). Years later brings us to now and growing up we had little in common outside family get-togethers and sports, yet somewhere in the midst of that, the mere fact that we are cousins has made us best friends.

In the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints we believe that we are all brothers and sisters, born spiritually of the same Father in Heaven. This teaching does different things for different people. As for me, I understand that I am a child of God. I am a natural heir to greatness no matter what I struggle with here and now on earth. What if we treated the entire human race as our brothers and sisters. What if we were all something like cousins. What if our friendship to one another was just assumed despite the difference in our background and upbringing. We may not have that much in common, but somehow we make it work because we are family. This is something that I would love to make a regular part of my life. An assumed friendship for the entire human race. We can do it with cousins...why couldn't we do it with others?