Although we tend to think of family life as something very ordinary, it is not ordinary to God, who calls families to be a powerful sign as a community of love. 

Families today are hungry for a glimpse of God who they know deeply within is truly present to them. A God who may greet them amidst the dirty laundry, the fussing baby and the demands of job pressures as well as in their Sunday best. That God wears the faces of those whose lives we share. 

Where in your household do
you sense God's presence the most?

Each of us belongs to a family and yet no two families look exactly alike. Yet because families consist of people living together, we all have some things in common. We share times of joy and times of sadness, times of love and times of anger, times of closeness and times of hurt. Family relationships are vocations. Persons in their families are called to be in Christian relationship together. Families are settings where the gospel is made known and does its work of guiding, healing, reconciling and sustaining. Faith affects families. Families are crucibles of faith. 

As Christians, we are not families alone. God is part of each of our families and extends His grace to us throughout our journey through life. We have the Holy Family, Jesus, Mary and Joseph to pray for us as we struggle in our own families. Let us pray for ourselves and all those families in need of our prayers.

 According to Mitch Finley in Your Family in Focus families come in various sizes, shapes and descriptions. There are families with and without children, single and two parent families, young couples who have no children, older couples whose children have grown and gone, and blended families—families made up of parts of other families divided by divorce or death. Single people continue to belong to the family they grew up in and widowed people are not without a family. Whatever your family looks like, it is a genuine family.
 
 

The journey of faith is impossible to prescribe or outline for any one individual or family. Faith is a need, not a should. If we stay in touch with that need, we will try to meet it. In our awareness of the journey, we will continue one step after another.
(Leif Kehrwald, "Family Spirituality - the Raw Ingredients of Faith" now out of print)