Self-Care For Families

What do you do as a family to unwind and recharge?

How does your family ensure that you have quality time together each week?

Teens live busy lives and sometimes it seems like there is no time for family any more, and friends take priority. But, it is important to seek that time with family to unwind together, laugh together.

I follow a page on Facebook called Mindful Christianity Today. They post quite often and share some great inspiration to remind us what being a Christian is all about. The above photo is one that they have shared recently. I would recommend giving them a follow if you have Facebook. It's a great way to keep God in mind even when mindlessly scrolling through social media. Click here to check them out.

Comment your family traditions of self-care and relaxation. Maybe you watch a movie together every Tuesday or make breakfast together each Saturday.

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Creation, Revelation, Redemption

Someone I have come to admire quite a bit is a man named Rabbi Jonathan Sacks. He is an excellent scholar and author. His website releases weekly articles called Covenant and Conversation. In one of theme, it states, " Creation is God’s relationship to the world. Revelation is God’s relationship with us. When we apply revelation to creation, the result is redemption : the world in which God’s will and ours coincide". Our theme over the past months has been "Care for Creation" and we have looked at the majesty of the created world. I enjoy the triad of this relationship by which the created world, humanity, and God come together. Jesus speaks of the kingdom of God in the gospels, and we say in all the time in the Lord's Prayer, "Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in Heaven". Again here, we see this link between the kingdom and the will of God. How do we know what God's will is? Take a moment to pray on this. What is God...

Courage

Some of you have mentioned before that it can be hard to share our faith with our friends who do not practice a religion. Perhaps being Christian is something they would make fun of, or something that would make us seem different. I, too, have found myself in these situations, where it feels like we have to hide who we are. But what would true courage be? Though it can seem impossible, our friends might be more accepting than we first think, and perhaps we can change their stereotypes of what being Christian is. This is a form of evangelizing too: to teach others what Jesus taught us. The quote in the photo is by Brene Brown. If you have a chance, I recommend reading some of her work. Here is a link to one of her TedTalks where she discusses vulnerability and shame: https://www.ted.com/talks/brene_brown_on_vulnerability/transcript?language=en

Faith Development in a Secular World

Everyone experiences faith differently in their lives. It can be unfair to proclaim one's faith as stronger or more serious than another person's since everyone's relationship with God is different. James Fowler wrote about how faith develops throughout our lives and I had the pleasure of reading a lot of his work during my undergraduate degree. I found a graphic that summarizes his stages of faith development to save you four years of intensive study: When we are very young, our idea of faith is quite limited. We copy the things that our parents do, but according to Fowler, we do not really have an understanding of spiritual concepts just yet. Jumping to adolescence, one can see that in the struggle that teens have to form their own identities, they question religious values of their parents and communities. This is a normal part of growing up. We do this in many aspects of our lives, so it would be kind of strange if no teens questions the religious beliefs of t...

Progress, Not Perfection

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