Community

As part of my studies at BYU, I am taking a course that is training me to be a Family Life Educator, where I can teach courses on relationship strengthening. I love this class because there are only six of us in the class and we are privileged to work very closely with our professor. We have teamed up with Mountainland Head Start and have been teaching couples for the past month with the last class being last night. It has been awesome to teach, interact with, and learn from these couples as we teach them ways and techniques to better communicate with their spouses. For anyone interested, the organization I am now authorized by to teach as a Family Life Educator is called PREP Inc.  Within Our Reach is one of the course they have developed specifically for married couples. It is the leading researched relationship strengthening program and is incredible! My hope is to start teaching the classes on my own in the near future.

Last night I was driving home from the last class and was filled with an overwhelming sense of gratitude and love for my parents and for their marriage. I recognize that no marriage is perfect and there is going to be strain and conflict but that is the same with life and any relationship. To make a stronger relationship or a stronger person, there must be opposition and adversity to overcome. I feel like my parents have modeled a strong relationship for me to learn from. I was never aware of any arguments in their marriage and they always were expressing and demonstrating their love for each other. It always amazes me as I have gone through my studies that my parents seemed to know everything on how to have a strong marriage and naturally do everything the experts suggest. I feel blessed to have been raised in my family with my amazing parents!

A big part of our lesson last night with the couples was on allowing your community to strengthen your marriage and using your marriage to strengthen your community. I'll admit I have not been as involved in my community outside of my church. The LDS church provides such a strong community support that is awesome and great to be a part of. I realize that there is another community though that needs all our support.

This last week I went to a showcase for an organization called Revive Humanity to learn about the humanitarian work they do all around the world. I was amazed by the organization, their goals, and the impact they have on people. They locations around the world they are focused on and create service tours where volunteers are organized to make a trip and go give service. The volunteers fund their own trip. Each tour runs for about a week and gives the person an opportunity to see some of the sites and serve the people. All proceeds going to the organization go directly to helping the people. I think I annoyed a few people by questioning where my money would actually go. Some of the locations they go to are: the Philippines, Thailand, Jorand, Egypt, Bethlehem, Congo, Samoa, Hawaii, Georgia (USA), Tanzania, and more I can't even remember. You can go to their website to learn more. They also have a way to donate money while getting a t-shirt. You pay $3 a month plus $1 for shipping and get a new t-shirt each month.  Also, a reminder that the people of the Philippines have a huge need of help right now from the recent typhoon.

I am so inspired by the good in the world I have seen. I think it can be easy to see a lot of negativity and evil but there is so much good! and we can add to the good in the world! My challenge to each of us is to look at ways we can serve and ways we can give to help build a better world-wide community for everyone.