A Whole Selfish Family

I was once standing in the kitchen canning peaches when my whole family atmosphere fell apart around me in a matter of five minutes.

My husband asked our son to help in the backyard. My son didn’t want to help, so he decided to have an attitude problem about it. My husband was stressed and chose to get upset instead of teaching to the situation correctly. We all have our moments of weakness from time to time.

My daughter was supposed to be cleaning her room, but she was playing the piano instead. She had lost focus. When I called out her behavior, she also had an attitude problem.

My four-year-old son was busy playing outside and didn’t want to come in to use the bathroom, which meant someone had to clean him up and change his clothes. It wasn’t a convenient time for me or my husband to handle this problem. Truthfully, we were both feeling a little selfish right then because the day was falling apart. Almost the entire Peck family was being selfish!

This was an emergency! Standing there in a mess of peaches, I gathered the family for an emergency meeting and re-focus session.

I described everything I saw. I pointed out that almost everyone in our family was behaving selfishly. I reminded the family of our 20-year vision and compared it with the feeling in the house right then. Everyone took a minute to feel the selfish spirit in the home. Then we prayed and sang until we felt the Spirit return to our family.

We went back to our individual tasks. I’ve never seen my family work so hard or selflessly. I’m glad we behaved so selfishly so that we could recognize it and choose to be selfless instead. It’s a blessing when the family needs to be corrected because it gives us time to not only learn how to improve ourselves, but also notice our short-comings.

Part of governing your behaviors is possessing a knowledge of your behaviors so that you can control them. The more behaviors you catch, assess and fix, the more aware you are of yourself and the more you can control yourself. That’s how our families can achieve success!