My last post was as follows:
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How does one balance family unity and religious choice?
Specifically, in a case like mine, where you have young children who aren't interested in participating in your chosen religion anymore.
It just feels wrong to be sitting by myself on Sunday mornings when that is time I could be with my children.
What are your thoughts? Is it better to nurture my own faith and sacrifice time with them? Is it better to find a church where we can all worship together?
I know that the responses I get will be as varied as the people that you are....I am truly interested in your perspective on this one. How do we honor our own beliefs while honoring our most important priority?
Thoughts?
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As I have reflected on this and heard from several of my family members and friends off-site who all had different perspectives, I realized that I fell into my old habit of looking at differences instead of focusing on common ground.
In our world we tend to look at differences first instead of seeing how much we are alike.
So let me turn this question around...
How can I build unity in my family and focus my attention on the common bonds we share? How have you done this in your family? What are the benefits of focusing on commonalities vs. differences?
1 comment:
We yell a lot in my family. All of us. I think it's probably my favorite feature of our little clan ... all four of us have tempers, and our littlest one seems to run the hottest. I hope for the same outcome from our loud family exchanges as this commenter expresses below:
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Copied and pasted from the Sunstone blog:
... from Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago, where he says: If the beast who sleeps in man could be held down by threats—any kind of threat, whether of jail or of retribution after death—then the highest emblem of humanity would be the lion tamer in the circus with his whip, not the prophet who sacrificed himself. But, don’t you see, this is just the point—what has for centuries raised man above the beast is not the cudgel but an inward music: the irresistible power of unarmed truth, the powerful attraction of its example.
I submit that we each have a prophetic voice within ourselves. Let us persist with “unarmed truth”, having lost our fear of judgment or rejection. I dare say well intentioned bullies can be stopped or transformed when the bullied stand tall and find new, creative ways to respond. I hope that’s an eventual outcome of these exchanges.
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