The “Calling Couples to Christ” blog is just over six months old. Here is a summary of the number of people around the world that have been touched by this blog…

Here’s an excerpt:

A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 560 times in 2015. If it were a cable car, it would take about 9 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

Our family has a great affinity for Nativity scenes. We collect them, display them and enjoy looking at Nativity scenes from countries around the world. The variety of styles are fascinating and intriguing yet their message is the same, “a savior has been born…who is Messiah and Lord” (Lk 2:11). It has been our custom that the manger remains empty until the dark hours of Christmas Eve. Our family gathers around the crèche as Jesus is placed lovingly in the manger with reverence and awe. Traditionally, Luke’s account of the birth of Jesus is then read (Lk 2:1-20) or the birth of Emmanuel (Is 7:10-14), followed by a prayer of blessing such as this:

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It was late in the summer of 2000. Dennis sat there in heavy traffic hoping that he would not be late. He was on the way to the hospital to meet with a group of doctors who were caring for his wife. What was supposed to be a four-day hospital stay had turned into four months. Dennis suspected that this special meeting with the doctors could only mean that his wife’s condition was becoming grave.

During that sad four months, God had reassured him with scripture after scripture that He was going to heal his wife of her illness. They prayed for a miracle, they prayed for healing. Dennis found comfort in God Word’s and he believed that God would grant his wife the miracle of healing.

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The future of the world and of the Church passes through the family.^[i]

In last 50 years, the family has undergone profound and dramatic changes in what is now, a post-Christian culture. Family and marriage are being destroyed and deformed.^[ii] If the family and the Church – indeed the world – are to survive, we must return to God’s original plan for marriage and family.

In the plan of God the Creator and Redeemer, the family finds not only its identity, what it is, but also its mission, what it can and should do. Each family finds within itself a summons that cannot be ignored, and that specifies both its dignity and its responsibility: family, become what you are.^[iii]

God’s plan is for the family to be an “intimate community of life and love.”^[iv]

This post will review the state of family life, the need for instruction on living the vocation of marriage and family well, and propose the basis for a family spirituality to assist families in living out their call to be a “little church,”^[v] or in the words of Pope St. John Paul II: Ecclesia Domestica, the Domestic Church.^[vi]

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