How important is your family?

Sunday 26th February 2023 11:06

Mothering Sunday is 19 March, so what will you do to mark the occasion? Will you buy a card? Or will you phone your mum? Or will you have a meal with her? How important are the various members of our family?

I would say after God, Alison is the most important person in my life and we eat practically every meal together. But we also love our boys and make the time to eat with each of them at least once a month. And we also love our parents and so we visit my mum and dad each week and eat with Alison’s parents once a month. How much time to you make for your family? 

So what about work? I love my work and so there is a real danger that it expands to take over the whole week. So I have taken a deliberate decision that work is less important than Alison less important than our boys and less important than our parents. In practice this means that family meals may well be planned for work days and so work is scheduled around them.

Today we call this wellbeing but back in the sixth century St Benedict called this balanced and designed the monastic timetable to enable his monks to have 8 hours sleep, 8 hours praying and 8 hours work each day . So what about you? Who is the first priority in your life? And how much time will you make for your family? 

This Mothering Sunday let’s at least send our mum a card and make the time to phone them and may be we could even arrange to meet up for a meal.