Your Family was started on the day you got married, and after you took your vows.The presider may have uttered words similar to the ones above. It not only applies to you and your spouse, but also to your entire family. The world many times seeks to separate what God has joined together.
Living the Life
As our kids were growing up, we got involved in Church, sports and social club activities. It got to a point that we were busy every night of the week. I was a member of the church choir, my wife and I were deeply involved in building a Catholic School, three of our children were playing soccer and I was coaching them, and our daughters were members of a Catholic Girl’s club. In addition to these church and family related items, I worked full time with a bit of travel and even took lessons to become a private pilot. When a new opportunity for spiritual growth or volunteering came our way, our method of deciding whether or not to say yes was to take a look at our calendar and see if there was any spare time. If there was, we said yes until every moment of our life was filled with activities. 
Each of the activities we were involved in were good, it was the sheer number of activities that was bad for us. Looking back on that time in our lives, I don’t think we realized that this constant busyness was unhealthy for our family. We were just living a full life, volunteering for every worthwhile cause and making sure that each of our children was able have all the fun a child should have. We were on the road to burn out and to losing touch with our young family.
Then I took a new job and one of the highly suggested activities at my new company was to spend a couple of weeks at our corporate offices helping out in the technical support call center. It was a great way for a new Systems Engineer to quickly learn the technical aspects of the products while helping out our short-staffed support team. My wife and I discussed this extended business trip and we decided to buy an RV and make a family trip out of it. When the planning was completed, I had arranged a trip to California and back that lasted just under a month with stops at customer sites, national and state parks, theme parks and visiting friends and family along the way. I don’t know that I fully realized the immediate profound effect this trip would have on our family, nor the way it would shape our family life and rhythm for the rest of our lives.
Life Lessons from Living in an RV
When preparing to leave for this trip, we had to squeeze 10 people, all our clothing, bicycles, and any personal items we needed for a month into a 31 foot Class C RV with no slide outs and limited storage. This was a serious exercise in detachment, not only from possessions, but from our normal routines. I still did my work on the road, but pretty much everything else in our normal routine changed. We didn’t have any sports, school, social or church activities, we left all that behind when we pulled out of the drive on our way to California, we only had each other.
Our commitments at home weren’t missed, we didn’t long for our things, we had a great time and really grew closer together as a family over the course of our trip. We ate all our meals together, we visited shrines along the way, attended Sunday mass and an occasional daily mass together, met with friends in different cities, and we explored the beauty of God’s creation. In summary, we retreated from the world, prayed together, played together and formed closer bonds with each other and with the Lord. We emerged from our month long adventure a changed family with a renewed focus on what was most important in our lives.
The Family Mission
God taught us that one of his greatest gifts to us is our family. Each of our children brings something unique to our family, something we didn’t have before and something that makes our family unit better. We learned that we really like our kids and they like us too. Our kids didn’t need to be kept busy with tons of activities, they were just as happy, maybe even more so, to simply be with us. 
Unhealthy patterns had crept into our family, this RV trip was a good exercise which allowed us to take a step back and evaluate our lives and our family routine. We began to regularly spend time in prayer as a couple and as a family, asking God what our family’s mission should be and where we should be spending our time and energy. At times this exercise has resulted in minor adjustments, and sometimes major life changes to our family routine to ensure that we meet our primary goal of leading our family to heaven.
Every family needs to retreat from the world on a regular basis, this can take the form of a family vacation, a family retreat, or just making Sunday family days. But if you don’t plan for them, they probably won’t happen. Your family is a great gift from God, be sure to nurture and care for it.
The building blocks for a successful marriage and family life are healthy relationships. Indeed, the fundamental call of Christianity is to engage in healthy relationships with everyone we encounter on our journey through life. When we are young, our relationships are immature, often characterized by extreme selfishness, also known as being childish. If we don’t get our way, we throw a temper tantrum hoping that the person telling us “no” will be too embarrassed, too tired or too weak to stand their ground and thus give in and let us do what we want to do. Most people grow out of this stage somewhere around age 7 or 8. During the next few years leading up to adolescence, our goal is to teach our children, through the use of their new-found reason, to be obedient because it is the right thing to do. We also teach them self mastery and respect for legitimate authority. These basic skills are essential to building healthy relationships later in life as they search for their vocation (marriage or religious life).
back. God’s love is faithful, even if the other party in the relationship is unfaithful, God will still be faithful. Lastly, God’s love is fruitful, it is not sterile, the love between the persons of the Holy Trinity always bears fruit just as the love between a husband and wife bears fruit, often as a new person. We consider our ministry to be a fruit of the love within our family, we are compelled to share this love with other families and we encourage them to do the same. The words of Christ in the 14th chapter of St. Luke’s Gospel inspire us, “I have come to set the earth on fire, and how I wish it were already blazing!”. We are called to spread the fire of God’s love throughout the world, for it is the Love of God that will transform the world into a more just world, a more peaceful world and a world full of love for God and for our neighbor.
destination, but it is almost 8 miles from the Convention Center where the World Meeting of Families is being held, so we brought our bicycles (this is such a large event that transportation is going to be challenging for a group of 10). We really can’t afford to eat out for each meal, so we brought our groceries and our hotel room has a small refrigerator and microwave, but most of our meals will probably take place away from our hotel.
We believe that dating is practice for divorce. Think about it, you go out with someone for a period of time, if you are following God’s laws, you don’t get physically intimate with the other person, but most dating relationships today do involve quite a bit of physical intimacy, if not intercourse. So the couple gets emotionally involved, sometimes very involved and then at some point (since most young people date more than one person in their quest for a spouse) breakup and stop seeing each other. Feelings are hurt, friends are lost and the young people grieve or rejoice (depending on if they were dumped or were the dumper – note the common terminology used) and move on to the next person who they find attractive.