The Blog: Ministry, Music, Media
Peaceful Families posted on March 29, 2009
Dear Friends,
Thinking about peace, I have been searching the planet through the Internet and music contacts for songs about peace. If you have suggestions, please send them to me: (JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
As I have been delighted to find a variety of voices, musical styles and lyrical interpretations of peace in heart and life, you are invited to be listening for: Linda Arnold’s, Have a Peaceful Heart, or Peace is the World Smiling, from MFLP, or from Peter Broggs, Peace and Love - reggae style! I also thought it might be helpful to share some thoughts about peaceful living in family life. Turmoil is all around us - financial, health concerns, governmental issues and policies, wars are ongoing, and relationships struggle.
These moments in our society make peace seem like a good idea worked out between warring nations and does not apply to the reality of context in our home life. Sometime we will have peace, but this is not that time. But isn’t today someone’s future dreamt about yesterday? If not peace today, when?
So, how then to approach parenting and living peacefully? CGR will be offering a new podcast series in the next couple of weeks to talk about faithful parenting with people from all over the country who have expertise in parenting contexts, living peacefully and enriching the spiritual life of the family to meet challenges is one topic that is addressed. For now I would like to offer a few spiritual menus items to prayerfully consider in your life, today.
Being peaceful:
Ghandi said,
Be the change you seek.. It is not hard to say, be the peace you seek. Just imagine what that might look like in your life at home with your children and partner. Would your behavior change?
Active peace:
Jeremiah 29:7
And be working for the peace of the land to which I have had you taken away prisoners, and make prayer to the Lord for it: for in its peace you will have peace.
Could we be really intentional in our family lives to help children learn that peaceful ways are good ways to honor God with our lives?
Peace from within:
Sr. Joan Chittister said,
The fact is that God is not beyond us. God is within us and we must go inside ourselves to find the spirit that sustains our spirits but silence is the lost art in a society made of noise.
As parents, what if we really did take a minute to pray for the noise to be dulled and God’s love to be made known in each challenge we faced? Would this spiritual discipline give us the centering and perspective we need when faced with our beautiful children and their needs? Would our love show through in times of stress? Would we demonstrate as often as we were intentionally able the clear, heartfelt thinking that comes when we put things through our faithful filter to honor God with all our actions?
Your thoughts and comments are meaningful to us here at CGR. If you can think of songs that would speak to peace, let’s get them programmed in the music line-up with the songs we have!
What do you think peace is?
with blessings for the common good with grace, peace and love (GPL),
Pastor Robin
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Listening With the Kids posted on March 25, 2009
Dear Friends,
I was thinking about parenting this morning and how challenging it is to get inside the head of the kids to have a clue what they are thinking, praying, hoping and trying. We do this perhaps because we would like to know that they are well, spiritually vital and emotionally healthy. Sometimes we get so busy that we do not give the children a chance to tell us who they are. And then we get so busy, we forget how important it is to ask and to, listen.
I know I wanted to be listened to as child, didn’t you?
As a musician, I studied listening. Still do. As a pastor, one does a great deal of listening, which is a blessing. I learned something about listening a few years back while I ran a not for profit preschool and daycare. Loved most of that experience by the way, and some of it was so heart wrenching I can’t even begin to tell you about it right now.
One of the things that I loved was listening with the children. At the end of a warm day, before the last of the parents came to pick up their babes, a couple of us would take the kids outside to sit by the pond that was next to the church in which we were located. We would just sit to be very quiet and listen.
The children would point out the sounds of bugs, water, ducks or wind. It was better than movies and television.
They would talk about how the bugs would talk to the flower they landed on, or how the ducks talked to each other. If we had time they would make up stories about all these sights and sounds. As the adult, I just listened.
You can tell kids a lot of stuff, but sometimes you have to just sit and listen to what they notice in the world. You can do this with them through natural landscapes, cityscapes and of course, Common Good Radio. Listening to music is great fun, fills the spirit with new breath and can be a doorway to transcendence. If you listen to the music of CGR with the children you love, you prayerfully will experience these things together - and hopefully you will like it as much as the children do!
I hope you will join Common Good Radio Club and consider sending us your stories to share between the songs. Your stories of hope and love because you are listening to one another will inspire others to do the same. It all makes the children part of the common good, and that sounds like something good to me.
blessings for the common good with grace, peace and love (GPL),
Pastor Robin
