THANK YOU is a phrase that is fundamental to life, starting with family life. Together with PLEASE and SORRY, it’s a key that opens the way to a well-lived life, to a life of peace. We ought to imagine those words as if they were signs on the front doors of our homes and our lives. They may seem easy to say but we know they really aren’t so simple to put into practice.

                  Yet they contain a great power: a power that preserves the home, even during trials and difficulties; whereas their absence slowly broadens the cracks that weaken that house and can even make it collapse.

                  There are times when it seems our society wants to behave as a culture of bad manners and bad speech, almost as if this were a mark of emancipation. We sense it not only in our personal lives but also in public discourse.

                  Kindness, care, expressions of gratitude, are often seen as signs of weakness. They arouse suspicion , sometimes even hostility. But this tendency needs to be resisted, everywhere, beginning with the original nucleus of society, the bosom of the family.

                  We must be uncompromising in the teaching of gratitude, of thankfulness. Human dignity and social justice both stem from here. If family life ignores this approach, and we ourselves ignore it, then social and public life will lose too.

                  Gratitude is at the very heart of faith, especially for a believer: A Christian who cannot say thank you is simply someone who has forgotten the language of God.

                  To say PLEASE, then, is an act of consideration, the request to enter with kindness into the life of others, a mark of respect toward them as individuals……There’s a beautiful expression in The Little Flowers of St. Francis of Assisi: “Know that courtesy is one of the attributes of God….and courtesy is the sister of charity, which extinguishes hatred and conserves love.”

                  If the world in which we live is violent and arrogant, this means that much more courtesy is needed: starting with the family, starting with ourselves.

By Pope Francis in his book HOPE, pages 73-74

How often do YOU hear yourself saying, PLEASE, SORRY and THANK YOU?

GOD CARES A LOT MORE ABOUT WHAT’S IN YOUR HEART THAN WHAT’S IN YOUR FRIDGE!