Friendships in the Family

I love my kids!  I delight to see them enjoy sweet friendship with one another.   The quote below reminds me not to take such family-love for granted.   Care is required - WE MUST WIN one another's Love inside the home doors!!   Good counsel and good exhortation to me as Father, to seek to cultivate such love within the home.   I fear I've often failed through neglect - but other times I rejoice to see and hope that sibling friends in our home are best friends.   The lack of Family Friendships is wounding but the practice and display of GODLY brotherly love between brothers and sisters towards each other works to the GLORY OF GOD.  God give us more of this daily! 

“In every home where there are brothers and sisters, there is a field which needs only wise, patient culture—to yield life’s richest and loveliest things. Are we cultivating this field or is it lying neglected, covered, perhaps, with weeds and thorns, while we are spending all our strength in trying to make harvests grow on some bare, rocky hillside?…

Friendships in the family require care and culture—as do other friendships. We must win one another’s love inside the home doors just as we win the love of outside friends. We must prove ourselves worthy; we must show ourselves unselfish, self forgetful, thoughtful, and kind, tender, patient, helpful. Then when we have won each other we must keep the treasure of affection and confidence, just as we do in the case of friends not in the sacred circle of home.”
J.R. Miller , 1882 (source)

HT: Becky  -- thank you Becky for the great example.