If you don't recount your family history, it will be lost. Honor your own stories and tell them too. The tales may not seem very important, but they are what binds families and makes each of us who we are.
Interpretation
Sharing family stories helps preserve history and strengthens bonds.
This quote emphasizes the importance of recounting and honoring family history. It suggests that by sharing our personal narratives, we not only keep these memories alive but also foster connections among family members, highlighting that these stories, regardless of their perceived significance, play a crucial role in shaping our identities and relationships.
In practice
In a family gathering, you could say, 'Remember what Madeleine L'Engle said about sharing our family stories; let’s recount some of our favorite memories together.'
Truth is what is true, and it's not necessarily factual. Truth and fact are not the same thing. Truth does not contradict or deny facts, but it goes through and beyond facts. This is something that it is very difficult for some people to understand. Truth can be dangerous.
George MacDonald gives me renewed strength during times of trouble--times when I have seen people tempted to deny God--when he says, "The Son of God suffered unto death, not that men might not suffer, but that their sufferings might be like his.
I never want to lose the story-loving child within me, or the adolescent, or the young woman, or the middle-aged one, because all together they help me to be fully alive on this journey, and show me that I must be willing to go where it takes me, even through the valley of the shadow.
The minute we begin to think we have all the answers, we forget the questions.
When we believe in the impossible, it becomes possible, and we can do all kinds of extraordinary things.
Rather than feeling lost and unimportant and meaningless, set against galaxies which go beyond the reach of the furthest telescopes, I feel that my life has meaning. Perhaps I should feel insignificant, but instead I feel a soaring in my heart that the God who could create all this — and out of nothing — can still count the hairs of my head.
Our entire family is replete with sentiments of patriotism. Uncle Swarna Singh left for his heavenly abode in jail in 1910, two or three years after my birth. Uncle Ajit Singh is leading the life of an exile in foreign countries.
One of the most important gifts a parent can give a child is the gift of accepting that child's uniqueness.
Your responsibility as a parent is not as great as you might imagine. You need not supply the world with the next conqueror of disease or major motion picture star. If your child simply grows up to be someone who does not use the word "collectible" as a noun, you can consider yourself an unqualified success.
I want to give a child a life who wouldn't be given a life. I want a child that nobody else wants.
A study of family portraits is enough to convert a man to the theory of reincarnation.
Many things can wait. Children cannot. Today their bones are being formed, their blood is being made, their senses are being developed. To them we cannot say "tomorrow." Their name is today.
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