SAY YES TO ECK
I want to be able to listen to Thy Will and be in harmony with ECK, myself, and my child.
As a parent, how can I know the difference between my will, my child’s will, and Thy Will?
How can I be clearly focused on Thy Will while making decisions, especially when my child and I have different opinions or when it comes to having some rules at home?
What should I do as a parent, Mahanta, in such situations? How to say YES to ECK?
—Periya, India
Raising a family is truly a testing ground for parents. They want to do what’s right for everyone in the family, including themselves. Where to start?
When my wife and I raised our daughter, it was with the understanding that she was indeed Soul, but she also had to learn the ways of people around her. We expected some behaviors from her we would not insist upon today, if we had to do it all over again.
We did our best. We tried to balance her rights and ours, in keeping with divine will as we understood it then.
Such an ideal balance, of course, kept shifting as all three of us were individually meeting the events of the day. A hard day at work might leave my wife and me testy, short on patience. Our daughter might also return from school upset by a teacher or a classmate. But we’d listen to each other in the shelter of our home.
You asked, how to say yes to ECK?
Every family has rules that teach children how to get along at home and away. I treated our daughter like a companion, but when she broke a family rule, my voice took on a sharp edge. She knew she’d better toe the line.
As a family, we closed the day by reading her ECK discourses with her and singing HU. They unite.
June 2018, The Mystic World