Be Kind, Be safe, Be respectful, Be responsible, Be resilient, Be ready

Dear Parents

We are all very excited to see the work on the portable has commenced, we are hoping to be able to use it by the 13th of December.

There is a story of a young woman who took care of her old aunt. On her deathbed, the aunt spoke to her niece, “You have been good to me. I want to reward you. Take this frayed jumper of mine and wear it till you become rich.” The niece expressed gratitude but felt disappointed and thought that her aunt might have left her a watch or a ring.

She took the jumper and put it in a drawer and forgot about it. A year or two after her aunt’s death, the niece was looking for something old to put on before she commenced a big cleanup of the backyard. She remembered the jumper and fetched it from the drawer. As she was putting it on she felt something in the pocket of the jumper. It was a small key wrapped in a note that told her of a deposit box in the local bank. In the box was a legal document that gave her title to her aunt’s bank account; it had more than three hundred thousand dollars in it.

One moral from this story could be that we often miss the treasures that are part of our lives because we do not take the time to notice them. Another moral might be that when we unlock the deposit of gifts that is within us, it has an enabling effect on other people. If we were to focus on the treasure in our life as being our children and the deposit as the gift of parenthood, we might consider how we are using our ‘gifts’ and our ‘treasure’.

For example:

How well do we use humour in our chain of command? Laughter is a sign of life. What kind of signals are we putting out to our children?
How are we providing a loving home environment where our children can flourish, where cultural traditions and timeless values are passed on to future generations through our children?
How are we teaching our children to ‘ give and take’, to have the opportunity to give and receive with everyone receiving the benefits of both?
How clever are we at separating the ‘big issues’ from the lesser ones? Compromise can be an expression of strength if the outcome is mutually beneficial.
How often do we pray for our children?

There is a saying that ‘Good friends are like stars; you don't always see them but you know they are always there’. We need to be ‘good friends’ to our children, the treasures in our life, by providing a framework of good parenting within which our children can develop in “wisdom and age and grace before God and man”. Luke 2:40

Thank you and keep smiling

Cathy

Australian Catholics