I'm so tickled that Pope Francis is speaking on the family while in the Philippines. His message is beautiful, inspiring, and concrete as far as what our mission should be in living out our family life. This paragraph from his address really stuck out:
"Our world needs good and strong families to overcome these threats! The Philippines needs holy and loving families to protect the beauty and truth of the family in God’s plan and to be a support and example for other families. Every threat to the family is a threat to society itself. The future of humanity, as Saint John Paul II often said, passes through the family (cf.Familiaris Consortio, 85). The future passes through the family! So protect your families! See in them your country’s greatest treasure and nourish them always by prayer and the grace of the sacraments. Families will always have their trials, but may you never add to them! Instead, be living examples of love, forgiveness and care. Be sanctuaries of respect for life, proclaiming the sacredness of every human life from conception to natural death. What a gift this would be to society, if every Christian family lived fully its noble vocation! So rise with Jesus and Mary, and set out on the path the Lord traces for each of you."
If you find this to be inspiring, perhaps you might take a look at the Holy Family institute We are a religious institute aggregated to the Society of St. Paul, and just one of the ten branches of the Pauline Family. We are your ordinary married men and women, living out our normal everyday lives, but with the benefit of consecration to God through Church approved and recognized vows of poverty, chastity and obedience as practiced in the married state. In this state of consecration, one's entire life and being are gifted to God, as an act of religious worship, and whatever merit you may have received from prayers and works before are further amplified and directed towards both the mission of the Holy Family Institute (strengthening of marriages and families) and the Pauline Family as a whole (the spread of the Gospel through modern means of social communication). In addition, you share in the merits of the prayers and works of all the other members of the Pauline Family, all throughout the world.
We hold each other up. It truly IS a family, a family in Christ. If you knew you could spread the Gospel, and help those in troubled marriages and families by simply fulfilling the daily duties of your state in life, AND receive a hundredfold in return for your faithfulness, why wouldn't you?
