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Today's
Meditation:
There are many people in this world who treat their
co-workers and their colleagues better than they treat
their families. They're stricter with their children
and less forgiving of mistakes; they're more critical of
their spouses and have higher (and usually unrealistic)
expectations of them. They're more than willing to
spend time in a bar "unwinding" with colleagues,
but generally don't take their families out at all.
This is a sad way to go through life, of course, but many
people do so-- and they don't even notice what they're
doing.
Our families are a group of human beings entrusted to
us. No, we don't have to support every member of our
families, and we aren't necessarily our brothers' keepers
all of the time. But we do have a special bond with these people, and the best thing that we can do is to
honor that bond and give our love and compassion to those
people closest to us.
Sometimes it takes a lot of effort. Sometimes our
children seem to have done certain things just to get us
mad. Sometimes we don't understand how our spouses
could have forgotten just how important that certain
something is to us. But that's just our limited
perspective playing unpleasant games with us, making us
imagine transgressions that truly aren't there at
all. And sometimes we just take for granted the idea
that our families are there for us, whenever. We
forget that they, too, need attention and love and
compassion. We end up neglecting those very people
whom we should never be neglecting.
Family takes effort. Sometimes the effort seems huge
in scope, but usually it's just a bit of
effort here and there-- but it's effort nonetheless.
And our effort to share our love and time and presence
with our families will bear great rewards, as long as we
don't raise our expectations to meet our efforts.
And those rewards will help us to be leading a very rich
life, indeed.
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