Fostering Faith in your Family  with Father Francis (F5)

One of the areas that I would like to work on this year is helping families to grow in their faith. I want to do all that I can to help parents and children have conversations about their relationship with God, because I believe our faith grows stronger when we can talk about it and share it with each other.

Growing up, my dad was the one who taught me how to pray. I have wonderful memories of praying the Our Father with him each night before bed. We would pray next to an image of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Even as a kid, I knew my dad had a very strong devotion to the Sacred Heart. I knew my dad loved Jesus and that his faith was important to him. Because it was important to him, it was important to me. 

My dad helped to foster my faith by teaching me about the saints. He would get comic books about the saints and give them to me. And he would read me children's Bible stories. As I got older, he encouraged me to be an Altar Server. My dad served as a Lector and as a Eucharistic Minister. So it was especially cool to be up on the altar and serve at Mass with my dad. On the drive home from Mass, he would ask me about the readings and what I got out of the homily. And he would share what was important to him. They weren't long conversations, but they were important to me and obviously had a lasting impact.

I want to help our St. Josaphat families to have similar conversations and to grow comfortable talking about our faith with each other. To help foster these moments, we will be adding a section to the bulletin each week called, "Fostering Faith in your Family." It will include questions or conversation you can have as a family around the dinner table based on the Sunday readings. Occasionally we will include activities you can do as a family to help celebrate the liturgical seasons. And from time to time, I will also send out emails with follow up thoughts from our Sunday homilies to help spur discussion.

I would love to hear other suggestions from you about how we can help foster faith in your families. Are there things that you do as a family or remember from your childhood that helped you grow in your faith? Please share them with me:  frfrancis@stjosaphatparish.org and we can include them in our Fostering Faith in your Family section of the bulletin. 

Jesus is important to each and every one of us. If he wasn't, none of us would be here and you certainly wouldn't be reading this bulletin. Let's get better at talking about our faith with each other and especially with our children!

God Bless,