DeVries Family Meeting

Faith Formation Begins At Home

DeVries Family Meeting This Lent, All Saints has provided copies of Matthew Kelly's amazing book, Four Signs of a Dymanic Catholic to parishioners and guests. The Four Signs: prayer, study, generosity, and evangelization, were all things that the most engaged and dynamic Catholics had in common to some extent.  When you read the book, it is impossible not to be challenged to actually buckle down and become what Matthew Kelly calls "the-best-version-of-yourself!" Well, after reading the chapter on generosity, I called a DeVries Family Meeting. (This is a fancy word for holding everyone hostage before they are excused from the table).  There was one line in that chapter that hung with me over the week and I wanted to talk about it: "If it doesn't get measured, it doesn't get done." A retired businessman in our Friday morning book study noted that this is common maxim in the business world, too. If you aren't measuring the change you want, it probably isn't going to happen.  Matthew Kelly also put it this way: "You don't just FALL into good habits. You have to work at it!" So, with these thoughts on my mind, I called together the troops and told them that I'd read a good "God" book (no, not the Bible) that had me thinking about this question:   How much does our family pray? "You mean, like, in minutes?" A conversation ensued about how many waking minutes we are gifted with each day: Say 720 per person for 12 waking hours. Now we have 7 people in our family, so that's 5040 minutes that God gives our family each day.  OK. So--how many minutes do we spend each day actively talking to God who is actively giving us life? We added up our mealtime prayers (times seven), and our most-of-the-time morning perusal of the daily readings, and a few people added in their regular bedtime prayers, until we came up with what we think is a pretty good daily average.  Sundays throw the total way up since Mass is an hour. But as we looked at our total, a collective feeling of awkwardness shrouded our meeting.  It wasn't a very high number. I simply asked the girls: do you think we are being generous with our time of prayer to God?  What do you think we should be offering to him as a family and how can we do better? My 6 year old had a great idea: "How about we all pray the same number of minutes as our age?"  As the chronologically advanced members of the family exchanged a pensive look, the ten year old threw out another idea, "Maybe every time we pass by the crucifix at the top of the stairs, we could say a Hail Mary?" After a few more minutes of brainstorming, we all left the table just thinking a little bit more about how we should think about God just a little bit more in our day.  My 6 year old brought me a Rosary a few minutes later and asked if I would pray with her.  She said if I prayed with her our prayer time would get doubled.  So I did. Sometimes I think that my husband and I are the spiritual leaders of our family, but usually we just need to call a DeVries Family Meeting to discover how the spiritual gifts of our children are really leading and challenging us to grow.  I began the meeting with the idea of how we could measure and improve our family in one area: prayer.  I came out with a new respect for my children.  Time is their love language, and it isn't all that hard for them to fall into prayer, because for them it is like falling in love. May the children in our lives lead us all to grow in prayer, in patience, and in a more generous giving of love.