Family life is blessed, and family life is hard. God created the human family and his design is perfect, even if we fail to fully live up to it. In this edition of By Your Life, we reflect on the rich guidance our readings offer us to perfect our family lives and the insight provided to make both our home and work families healthier.

Mass Readings Audio
http://ccc.usccb.org/cccradio/NABPodcasts/2019/19_12_29.mp3

The Holy Family of Jesus, Mary and Joseph – December 29, 2019

Welcome to the ninety-second episode of By Your Life. I’m Lisa Huetteman and I know that you have a hundred different things you could be doing right now, so I thank you for choosing By Your Life.

My goal is to inspire, empower, support, challenge, and encourage you to connect Sunday, with Monday-Friday, in a secular, business world. It’s my desire to help you live our Catholic faith in the marketplace. I hope to offer you practical ways to go forth and glorify the Lord by your life.

In this edition, we’ll reflect on the readings for the feast of The Holy Family of Jesus, Mary and Joseph. This week, we celebrated Christmas and welcoming the baby Jesus into the Holy Family. Most of us celebrated this feast with our own families. For some of us, this was a true blessing, for others it was a challenge, and for some, it was a little of both. A friend of mine was telling me that she needed a day of peace and quiet to recuperate from having fifteen people at her house for Christmas. “My family is loud.”, she said, “and each person has to talk louder to be heard over the other.” So, while she was blessed to have everyone at her house, for her, it was also a challenge.

Family life is blessed, and family life is hard, and no family represented these truths of family life better than the Holy Family. God created the human family and his design is perfect, even if we fail to fully live up to it. God entered into about as perfect of a human family as one can imagine, yet that didn’t eliminate the difficulties, they just knew how to deal with them.

So, this week, I’d like to reflect on the rich guidance our readings offer us to perfect our family lives and the insight provided to make both our home and work families healthier.

Over the years, I have worked with companies on developing values-centered cultures and there have been three organizations I’ve worked with that identified “family” as a core value. While every single organization I’ve worked with was made up of people who came from families and went home to families, only these three recognized, and in fact valued the fact, that family is important to them.

The first organization was a department within a multinational corporation. In defining “family” as a core value for their team, they said:

FAMILY: We believe we are better at work as a team when we have balance in our personal and professional lives. So:

• We commit to nurturing healthy, trustworthy relationships inside and outside of work.
• We commit to encouraging and supporting each other in achieving our objectives.
• We commit to recognizing and honoring our personal and professional life balance.

The second company was in the construction industry and they recognized the relationship between personal and professional success. The owners defined “family” as a core value by saying, “Each family/team member works selflessly toward a common goal. We genuinely care about each member of the team and help them get where they want to be as individuals while perpetuating the business goals.”

The third organization was a professional services firm. They acknowledged that each employee needed their work “family” to support them when their personal life presented daily challenges. As an extension of the home family, they committed to honor the “family” core value by:

• Supporting employee family activities
• Being flexible with emergencies/illness/family commitments
• Welcoming kids in the office if there are daycare issues
• Encouraging healthy habits
• Treating others as they wanted and expected to be treated
• Looking out for each other and being willing to help, understanding that people have bad days; and
• Working to resolve differences in the same way families have disagreements and need work through issues.

These organizations each understood and valued the importance of having healthy families and they committed to help each other to achieve healthy home and work lives.

Whether we are talking about at home or at work, creating strong family relationships isn’t easy. Some people don’t come from healthy families and all they know is conflict. They never learned how to develop trusting relationships at home, and they operate out of fear and bring these dysfunctional behaviors to work. If we are honest, we all fail from time to time to foster healthy relationships at home and at work. So, let’s look to our second reading for help.

St. Paul in his letter to the Colossians writes, “Put on then, as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, heartfelt compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience.” (Col 3:12) If only it were this easy! He says to just put on these traits as if they were as simple as getting dressed in the morning. But his advice, while difficult to follow consistently, is nonetheless good advice. Put on heartfelt compassion. Put on kindness. Put on humility, gentleness, and patience. Yes, just like you go in the closet in the morning and choose what to wear that day, choose to put on heartfelt compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience. Make it a conscious choice.

In episode 090 of By Your Life, we talked about Practicing Patience and in episode 041, we discussed the Power of Humility. It may be worth revisiting those episodes if a lack of patience and/or humility is your greatest challenge. In this episode, however, in order to foster healthier relationships, we’ll focus on developing compassion, and not just plain old everyday compassion, but as St. Paul writes, “heartfelt compassion.”

So, what is compassion? It is the concern for the sufferings or misfortunes of others. But “heartfelt compassion” is something more. It allows us to feel the sufferings of others, and this is what makes it so difficult. We are conditioned to avoid suffering and to protect ourselves from it. Henri J.M. Nouwen wrote, “Compassion is hard because it requires the inner disposition to go with others to a place where they are weak, vulnerable, lonely, and broken. But this is not our spontaneous response to suffering. What we desire most is to do away with suffering by fleeing from it or finding a quick cure for it.”

As well-intentioned as this may seem, fleeing from suffering is avoiding an opportunity for growth. In the words of Helen Keller, “Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experiences of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, vision cleared, ambition inspired, and success achieved.”

Developing character through experiences of trial and suffering is what psychologists Richard Tedeschi and Lawrence Calhoun call “post-traumatic growth.” They found that many people dealing with personal suffering discovered more than just a greater ability to cope with negative situations. Instead, they encountered a powerful catalyst for personal development and gained significant benefits from their traumatic life events. But suffering does not cause growth, it simply creates an opportunity for it. Whether or not we realize the potential for growth is a choice…a choice that is fueled by grace.

Choosing to put on heartfelt compassion, means we choose to allow ourselves, as Henri Nouwen says, “to go where it hurts, to enter into the places of pain, to share in brokenness, fear, confusion, and anguish. Compassion challenges us to cry out with those in misery, to mourn with those who are lonely, to weep with those in tears. Compassion requires us to be weak with the weak, vulnerable with the vulnerable, and powerless with the powerless. Compassion means full immersion in the condition of being human.”

This is hard to do with those who are closest to us and even harder to do with those we work with. But, only when we take our focus off ourselves, and how “they” and “their” behavior affects us and focus on them and what’s going on in their lives, will we be able to grow in compassion. Daniel Goleman, the emotional intelligence guru and author of Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships, confirms this. He writes that “Self-absorption in all its forms kills empathy, let alone compassion. When we focus on ourselves, our world contracts as our problems and preoccupations loom large. But when we focus on others, our world expands. Our own problems drift to the periphery of the mind and so seem smaller, and we increase our capacity for connection – or compassionate action.”

When we value family, we value human relationships which by their nature are imperfect. Yet, as St. Paul wrote, bear with one another and forgive one another. (Col 3:13) Or, as the professional services team said, look “out for each other and being willing to help, understanding that people have bad days.” We may do this imperfectly, but if this week, we just choose to put on a little more heartfelt compassion, we may find that our relationships improve and we may “let the peace of Christ control [our] hearts.” (Col 3:15)

Let’s ask the Holy Spirit to help us. Heavenly Father, we live in a world where we are so overcome with our problems, we struggle to remember that others are suffering too. Lord, fill us with compassion for our family, our co-workers, our neighbors, and our friends. Help us to see them as you do. Fill our hearts with love to see them through their trials and so that in everything we do, we may glorify you, Lord, by our lives.

If you liked this episode, spread the word. You know what to do, forward, share, or click to post. Also, check out the Resources page where you can find a link to the books and other resources mentioned in this and other episodes of By Your Life. I’m always interested in what you think, so give me some feedback by leaving a comment.