Family on the Rock!

Article for Bethlehem Matrimonial - Apr 2016

I was having a casual chat with a friend of mine a decade back while I was still a bachelor. He listened to me for a while and made quite a meaningful observation then. His statement was, “Wait till you get married, you’ll know how life will present a set of different challenges for you”. 

A couple of years later I was with my boss who recently became a dad and life came up as a topic of discussion then as well. I was at the verge of my bachelorhood and shared with him the above statement made by my friend earlier. My boss sighed and he made a very pensive statement. “Jerry, getting married is nothing! The moment you become a dad or mom; that is what I’ll call a game changer! Rest everything is pretty simple!” 

Fast forward six years and soon after I announced the arrival of our second child, promptly came a response from another friend of mine. “This will be the true test of your marriage!” And sure it was, since both my sweetheart and I felt that we’re going through a completely new set of challenge which we’d never faced before! 

Three instances, three different situations and one big lesson about life came out of them! It does not really matter what your situation really is. What matters the most is having a strong foundation built on a rock so that any number of mounting challenges can be faced together with the glue called family. This is a realization that needs to be developed during our earlier days of married life. 

For a couple, every new challenge they face in their married life is a test they undertake together. With each new challenge you face you are bound to experience tightening of a grip from an invisible hand on your life. The tighter the grip, the bigger the challenge! You won’t even realize that you’ll start feeling so uneasy for even those silly things at which you’d laughed earlier together as a loving couple. Such is the power of these unforeseen challenges! There is only one way to overcome these. Build your families on a rock, the very rock on which St Peter was given the command by God Himself to build the Church! 

Trust me; it isn’t easy to think that you’ll resolve the issues when they strike you. Many of us prepare ourselves with certain amount of financial backing to be used in the event of a monetary crisis. Very similarly we need to have an emotional backing when there are crisis times that come right out of the blue. All of a sudden you may be faced with a completely new challenge! It can be a totally new experience in your married life, something about your kids or your health or anything whatsoever. What’s important for you is to be prepared for such an eventuality if and when it decides to surprise you. 

Here is a question that you may want to ask yourself right from the time you step into the world of families and keep repeating the question once a while. Is my family built on a rock so that it can withstand even the mightiest of the tremor that it will experience in future? 

If you think your foundation is set on shaky pebbles, ensure that you and your partner accept this fact and quickly get into the action of cementing a strong foundation for your family. Among the multiple ingredients you could add to make a strong foundation, prayer stands out to be the finest of the lot. Ensure that you have a healthy mix of love and prayer to have a very strong base on which you build your relationship one day after the other. 

May the good God bless you withstand all the challenges you may face in future together as a family on the rock solid foundation you create on your love for each other and prayer, which is a communication with God Himself! 

All the best!