My Decision to have Family Home Evening

I belong to the church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints or also known as the "Mormons". In our church they encourage us as families to hold a weekly "Family Home Evening", one night a week where we stop running in 5 million different directions, assemble together, turn off electronics and just spend time as a family. For a long time I fought against this. For my husband and myself when we were growing up in our individual families, we referred to FHE as "family fight night". It happened irregularly and we always fought against it when our parents tried to do it. This may have been some of my hesitation in holding them in my own home. But every time I turned around it seemed, I just kept hearing 3 basic things that were supposed to be doing to strengthen our families. 1-Pray together as a family. 2-Read scriptures together as a family. 3-Hold weekly Family Home Evenings. Well I would say to myself, we are doing 1 & 2...2 out of 3 is not bad. But then I started asking myself, why I am not doing all 3? Don't I need all the help I can get to strengthen my family and my children in a world where families are falling apart?

So I made the decision a few months ago to start holding them. Tonight's was a short sweet lesson on Being a Child of God and an individual. I showed my children this clip from mormon.org: http://www.mormonchannel.org/video/mormon-messages/topics/children?v=1101413030001

After watching the video I asked my children? Did you see how many different people were in this video? People with different colors of skin, people old and young, people that spoke different languages (even sign language) my 8 year old pointed out. Then I asked what did all these people have in common? They are all children of God. Then I asked have you ever noticed snowflakes? How they are all different? Yet each one is beautiful and unique. I encouraged my children to look for the good in other people, even people they maybe didn't get along with, to try and appreciate that we are all Children of God and have our own talents and abilities, strengths and weaknesses. What a boring world this would be if we were all the same? We practiced finding good in others by throwing a ball back and forth to each other and who ever caught the ball had to say something they liked about someone else in the room. My children range in age from 10 years down to 3 months, so not all of them understood, but I think they all genuinely enjoyed the time we spent together. We finished off by making snowflakes and taped them to the windows, you can see how unique they each are. It may be "Spring" outside, but inside our house snowflakes are falling and our love is growing.

My children eat up this time we spend together. I have seen the peace and the blessings it has brought into our home. They may be too small to remember the spiritual lessons or to remember much about what was said, but I am hoping more importantly they will remember how they felt. They will understand that our family loves each other and enjoys spending time together. Those are just some of the reasons I am glad I made the choice to hold Family Home Evenings and plan on making it a continuing tradition in our home for years to come.