Relations in our family have been a little stressed this summer. there are a variety of reasons but I think is comes down to two things. We have lost our focus on God and/or each other. It’s not like we all sit in different parts of the house and not talk to each other. No the stress shows up in those times when you would expect conflict in a house with a couple of teenagers and parents. Our life is no different than that of a lot of other families but as a family of Christ-followers we have the right foundation to allow us to restore our relationships both vertically wiht God and horizontally with other family members. I guess you could say that we are putting to practice what I was preaching about in early Aug, with me taking on he role of Haggai (see this blog posting).
This experiment will last about 30 days so that we can begin to develop the habits of listening to God, thinking about the other in our family, and taking the focus off ourselves. This isn’t about gaining more head knowledge because we all know what we should do. The goal is to move our head knowledge to heart knowledge and then put it into practice.
Don’t know how it will work but so far (ok we have only been at it a day) so good. Yesterday the task was simple. All we did was send two text to the others in the family to encourage them or complement them on something they do well. The texts had to be at least 2 hours apart so you actually had to think about the task twice. The Proverb we reflected on was:
Start with God-the first step in learning is bowing down to God; only fools thumb their noses at such wisdom and learning. (Proverbs 1:7 MSG)
You see in this process we need to make sure our relastionship with God is strong so we can then use that to strengthen our relationship with others.
Today the task is to do the encouragement text again plus with $3.73 create something that the whole family can enjoy. We’ll see what happens.