I'm sitting up by myself in the middle of the night, because I can't sleep. In the morning we're packing up the suitcases and heading for the airport for the flight back from Atlanta to Bermuda. We've spent a week in the hills of Georgia. No. We've spent a week with my wife's brother, his wife and their two daughters. They've been telling family stories. My wife lost her father when she was still a young woman, and her mother followed a few years after that. Still, the memories are all over the house we were in, because her brother seems to have saved almost everything. He's got the money that was in his father's wallet the day he fell down dead from a heart attack. Downstairs, on shelves, he's got items from his father's workshop desk. They had been in business together. He's got binders of pictures of the family.

Around the dining room table, these people told story after story about the feisty faith of their predecessors, and I gained a sense of how God had developed faith from one generation to another in my wife's family.

One story lead to the next, one remembrance stimulated another. These stories took place in the context of real people who are also rough around the edges at times. Who would stand on the running board of a truck going 55 miles an hour down the interstate in order to look behind and see if the police were following? Not me!

I'm sitting up and looking at the pictures on the refrigerator. They catch these people at various stages in the journeys of their lives. These people are connected through loving relationship, not enmeshed through need and manipulation.

Psychologists are trained to identify disorder and dysfunction, and we often see its developmental patterns passed along from one generation to the next. Grandfather was an alcoholic, father was a workaholic and brother can't stop gambling. In each case other family members have taken up the slack; they have adapted and moulded around the limping family secret.

That kind of generational dynamic breeds co-dependency and unhealthy family systems.

People who grow up in such families often lack self-esteem ? really, even a basic sense of self, which is crucial for navigating life successfully. They often suffer from mood disorders such as depression, and they do not self regulate well. Consequently, they wear out on many levels. They can usually make it through their 20s, but then they hit a wall, and that's when the family secret becomes the family burden. In contrast, what's bred when someone stands at the end of a hospital bed and, with brazen faith, rebukes the illness and calls down the healing of God? What do children learn when they observe a mother or a father standing up in the middle of a church service to correct the deceptive, self-serving claims of religious hierarchy? What difference does it make to see a parent live in private by the words of faith they speak in public? What's the effect of watching other family members give credit to God for their blessings, relying on God for their needs, and turning toward others with a sense of genuine care?

My wife and her brother are third generation Christians. Something good got passed along from generation to generation in that family. I watched the results of that in her as we waded into the crowds of people taking things back after Christmas at places like the Mall of Georgia and various other stores.

I watched her strike up conversations with clerks who usually meet frazzled patrons with diminishing resources, and I marvelled at her ability to make them smile. I watched her brother love his wife, open his house to us and give. It's not a coincidence. What we do in families makes a great difference. Just as the dysfunction and decay common in humanity can be passed along from one generation to the next, so can faith, love, and good character. To some these are nothing more than sappy words people say at Christmas time. For others, they are the practical realities that shape people for the good.