Family Life - Stuck in a Rut?

I've been waiting so long to do this.  I guess I was hoping that I would know just the right thing to say and that I could make this so perfect.  Well, it's time to just start.

I'm striving for an ideal and I think you are too.  This ideal has nothing to do with how my house looks, how my current household systems are working, how much money we have or don't have, etc and everything to do with how the people in my family treat each other.  I have long believed that the quality of my life consists in the quality of my relationships with those around me.  That being said, my household systems are like the scaffolding that support my efforts to bring about real change in the relationships in our family.  So I will work on sharing them in this blog.  Our relationships aren't perfect, but this is what I want everybody in the world to know: they are getting better!!!!  I want to share with you the things that I have done and the changes we've made that have brought greater peace into our home.

I have been working towards this ideal so long that it's hard for me to determine what came first.  I don't know that it really matters though.  Years ago I imagined our family as a cart wheel stuck in a rut.  Obviously the ideal was to be NOT stuck in the rut.  I decided that the best approach to getting our family out of the rut we were in was not to sit there and try to think of the one thing that would move us up and out of the rut.  Improving family life is so much more complicated than that.  I decided to just move forward, to get moving forward as fast as I could doing the things I knew, making the changes that I could think of, and that in time, with enough speed, the wheel would just pop up out of that rut without my even realizing it.  That is truly what has happened.  I did what I could, made improvements as I could, one day at a time.  The changes we've made are building on each other and we're gaining speed.  We still pop down into the rut now and again, but for the most part, we have greater power to stay out of it with all we've learned and all we've incorporated into our family life.

Do you feel like your family is stuck in a rut?  Start with these principles that I quoted in my first post: 1- obedience to God's commandments, and 2- serving others unselfishly.  As we focus ourselves on these two principles, we gain access to God's grace, the enabling power of Christ's atonement.  Paraphrasing Howard W. Hunter, Sheri L. Dew writes "[I]f our lives are centered on Christ, nothing can ever go permanently wrong.  But if they're not centered on Christ, nothing can ever go permanently right."

My ideal is peace at home.  We're getting there.  You come too.