Family life and home!

The three phots taken on three different occasions are of a nest in a nutmeg tree in our garden, facing our courtyard. Ever since it appeared three week ago, I was looking for any bird movements around this nest. The zoom lens did not pick up any movements of ants which suggested that it might be a nest of a bird. 

Is it an abandoned nest! Some birds having made the nest do not return to it during the breeding season due to a threat it feels from the environment. Often, red ants which live on such tress can frighten the birds away. 

My thoughts centred on a nest yesterday, while I waited to spot any movement around the nest. 

A nest is a home!

A home represents intimacy, shared experiences and relationship between generations. 

Anna and I know a family who lives in a city in another country. On those occasions when we had an opportunity to visit them, we felt how much they practiced intimacy and communion in their relationships. Now that they are older, their children and grand children come to spend time with them to attend to their needs. The messages we receive from them tell us of the joyful transition they are making as a family. They celebrate happy memories of their home on every occasion they have. 

A home offers an ambience to think of others and grow in awareness of the comfort in relationships. 

I am fond of a passage in the Bible in Ecclesiastes 3:11-14: "He has made everything appropriate in its time. He has also set eternity in their heart, yet so that man will not find out the work which God has done from the beginning even to the end. I know that there is nothing better for them than to rejoice and to do good in one's life time. Moreover, that every man who eats and drinks see good in all his labour- it is the gift of God. I know that everything that God does will remain for ever, there is nothing to add to it and there is nothing to take from it, for God has so worked that men should fear Him".

We are given our family and home! We live in our homes as those who are blessed by the gift of others! We so live that a home nurtures and promotes goodwill and love language. 

We do come across instances where homes are a battleground, and relationships have turned sour. Children grow up receiving less of the bonding they need for their lives to be formed. 

A couple form a family, a family creates a home; a home fashions people to become messengers of a loving God. 

A family told me that their seven years old son waits for an opportunity to visit a children's home nearby to their home, where children from broken homes live in transit, before they find a foster home! What a formative upbringing this child would have received from his parents!

When Abraham Lincoln came home one evening, with a handful of eggs form a nest, his mother asked her son,  ' How will the mother bird  feel when it returns to the nest'?. His mother went back with Abraham Lincoln to place back the eggs in the nest. It seems that this created a deep impression of a compassionate outlook in his life to become a civil rights leader to campaign for abolishing slavery  in the USA.

A home is a place when our children become adults to live their lives with a vocation of mindfulness of others!

We celebrate, mother's Day, father's day and Valentine's day! 

I wish there will be a day in a year to celebrate 'Family life and home'!

M.C.Mathew( text and photo)