Monday 2 June 2014

Honoring Our Family Members

As my daughter and my husband were returning home after securing admission for her, I cleaned her room, made her bed with clean sheets. There is nothing new in doing these. But this time I did so being conscious of doing this with a spirit of honoring her. I experienced a new sense of delight and pleasure not the attitude of doing my mundane chores.

It is quiet easy to honor and even overlook an offense if the person is our guest or a person of honor. We may go an extra mile to honor such people. It is important to practice the biblical principle of being hospitable.

Yet, how often we have the same attitude towards our family members, our acquaintances, and those whom we see all the time. As my mother died during my mid-teen years, I have learned not to take our dear ones for granted. I learned to cherish my time with my family and extended family.  I made sincere efforts to let my children meet their extended family.

Still honoring is different from not taking someone for granted.  How is it different? To take someone for granted means to appreciate the ways by which a person enhances and contributes to the quality of your life and the relationship. Honoring also involves appreciation but it is to value the person not just valuing the person for his/her contributions.

As I began to think more about this after listening to last week's sermon of the visiting pastor, I realized that it is a perspectival shift which leads to practice shift. I am able to appreciate my dear ones as those whom God gave me to cherish and love not just because of their contributions. This naturally leads to not to take them for granted. But the starting point is honoring not the other way.

Imagine extending this perspective to all whom we come across. What a solace we would experience and smile we are able to bring in the hearts of those we meet! But let us begin this in our family.