The Blueprint

Most parents have a blueprint for their children. This blueprint captures their parental hopes and aspirations and depicts what they hope their children will become. Parents are guided by this desired outcome. Family activities and priorities; family rules and discipline; the extent of parental oversight and intervention; the scope of educational emphasis; the nature of employment aspirations; the degree of competitive focus; etc; all emanate from this blueprint. In some families this blueprint is an actual, hold-it-in-your-hand plan, consciously referenced and implemented. In other families, this blueprint is more a matter of subconscious tendencies or just a contextual environment in which the family functions.

In the perfect American family, with its average 1.86 children, the building captured in the blueprint rises and unfolds like a Frank Gehry work of art. The kids play well with others; are active in sports; learn to play a musical instrument; actively attend their church youth group; engage in a little community service; garner a few modest awards; graduate from high school with solid grades and without a disciplinary blemish; enter and graduate from college in 4 – 5 years; establish gainful employment; meet the love of their life; marry; buy a home; and have 1.86 children. The family enjoys its traditions and vacations; participates in its extended family and neighborhood structures; and functions comfortably within its socio-economic stratum. It’s the cycle of life. For the first 10 – 15 years of my family’s life, I felt like we were respectably “on plan”.

In most American families, the blueprint eventually gets filed away in the “Interesting Historical Documents of Near-Zero Value” file; one of those files stuck away in the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet because no one goes there very often. Somewhere along the highway to family heaven some of the lug nuts get loose and a couple of the “training wheels” come off the vehicle the family is driving to perfection. Hey, stuff happens. Sometime in the late 80s, I looked in the rearview mirror and saw a couple of the wheels on our family vehicle rolling around in the road. Said another way, we had become pretty normal. By the early 90s, however, we had run off the normal road and entered a time when our family was beset with several very serious challenges, not the least of which was my first wife and I separating and divorcing. Perfection was no longer something that needed to concern us. The blueprint was filed away.

From that point I began to desire only one thing for me, my family and my children – that each of us would be at peace with ourselves, our family and God. Peace became the only objective and the sole indicator of success in life. There are still some challenges in the Revised Plan, but we’re doing much better, thank you.

Against this background I opened an email from my daughter yesterday morning, after having started this blog entry. It was a prayer chain, most of which I hardly pay attention to. But this one referenced St. Theresa so it caught my eye. I’m a sucker for the saints. The email asked us to make a wish before we read her prayer. I wished for peace – for me, for my wife and me, and for our children. Then I scrolled down to see her prayer for the first time. It read:

St. Theresa’s Prayer

May today there be peace within.
May you trust God that you are exactly where you are meant to be.
May you not forget the infinite possibilities that are born of faith.
May you use those gifts that you have received, and pass on the love that has been given to you.
May you be content knowing you are a child of God.
Let this presence settle into your bones, and allow your soul the freedom to sing, dance, praise and love.
It is there for each and every one of us.

May there be peace within anyone who reads this blueprint. I, too, believe that it is there for every one of us to have today. Those who journey into yesterday or tomorrow may or may not find peace there. I, too, believe that having it lies in knowing who and what we are – that we are created in the image of God and forever contain that infinite source of peace. I, too, believe that our lives are receptacles of gifts and possibilities, and that those gifts are seen and those possibilities are realized to the degree that we serve as conduits of love and peace.

And, I believe that if we truly want freedom to be on the march in the world then this presence must indeed settle into our bones.