An old saying goes like this: Everyone's greatest blessing is also their greatest curse. At least sometimes, most of us probably feel that way about family life. Somehow, our greatest joys and our greatest sufferings are both linked up with family relationships. 

Did you ever wonder why God bothered to invent family life? He could have just made us like ferns - self-sufficient and self-propagating. But he didn't. Instead, he created us in his own image and likeness. Just as God is a Trinity, a communion of three Persons sharing the divine nature, we also are created to find fulfillment in community, in the intricate network of relationships that makes each one of us dependent on others, and others dependent on us. To be created in the image of God is to be created for family life. 

Since we are human beings, our family life doesn't come ready- made. The perfect family is not pre-fabricated somewhere and available for purchase on a wedding register. Family life is a task, a calling we have received from God. By creating us in his image, God has made us like a coloring book – the outline of what we are meant to be is provided, and the crayons, but it's up to us to color it in. 

How do we do that? How do we fulfill this central mission of our lives, imaging God through living a truly Christian family life? Three crayons are all we need to color in that portrait.

The first thing we can do to live a healthy Christian family life is to respect family roles. Just as the natural structure of a tree includes roots, trunk, and branches, so the natural structure of the family includes dad, mom, and children. They all go together and they all need each other in order to bear the fruit of maturity, wisdom, and happiness. 

The First Reading and Psalm paint a beautiful picture of this. Mom and Dad are in charge. Together they have and exercise authority over their children. 

As the Psalm reminded us, this authority is received from God, and with it comes responsibility. Parents must not abuse their authority, nor neglect the love, education in the faith, and training in virtue that they owe to their children. This is their primary mission in life. God is counting on them for this. 

St Paul in the Second Reading gives the formula for carrying it out: spouses must keep their love strong by serving each other. The new life of their children flowed from their joyful and mutual self-giving. To grow into healthy young adults, those children need a home atmosphere nourished by that same joyful, self-forgetful love of the parents. It's not primarily a matter of parenting techniques. Rather, it's a matter of parents loving one another unconditionally, as Christ loves each of them. 

However the First Reading and Psalm remind us that children have a key role too. They are to honor and obey their parents while they are growing up, and respect and care for them later on.

These are the healthy roles of family life. Children shouldn't act like parents, and parents shouldn't act like children. It's like a triangle. Mom is one side, dad is one side, and the kids are one side. If selfishness breaks one of those sides, the whole triangle falls. 

Respecting those roles is not easy in this fallen world, and that's where the second crayon comes in.

In today's Second Reading, St Paul gives us the foolproof formula for rebuilding the triangle whenever it gets broken or bent out of shape. It can be summed up in two simple words: I'm sorry. If we know how to say, "I'm sorry," our family relationships can endure and grow even through very, very difficult times. 

"Put on... patience," St Paul writes, "bearing with one another and forgiving one another, if one has a grievance against another; as the Lord has forgiven you, so must you also do." There is no way to create an atmosphere of forgiveness without being ready to ask for forgiveness. The best gift we can give our families is to make a commitment to always be the first one to say "I'm sorry" whenever there is the slightest need. 

We could never do that without Christ's example and help. But we have Christ's example and help, so we can do it. That little phrase is like super-glue for family relationships. It's even better than super-glue, because, like a broken bone that has been healed, a family relationship can become stronger than ever when nourished with the calcium of forgiveness.

But even our best efforts to build a truly Christian family will face obstacles. The fact that we live in a fallen world is – well, a fact. We can't escape from it. That's where the third crayon comes in.

To build a healthy Christian family, we have to expect trouble. We are pilgrims on earth. We are soldiers in a real spiritual battle. We are human beings with free will and deep-seated tendencies towards selfishness and sin – and we are surrounded by people with those same tendencies. 

Today's Gospel described for us a family on the run, suffering, struggling just to survive. 

If that's what happened to the holiest family in history, surely we should expect some of the same for our families.

God permits hardships, because he knows that hardships can bring us closer to him. St Matthew points out that the flight to Egypt fulfilled a prophecy – it furthered God's plan of salvation. Just so, when we face the hardships of family life with courage, we grow in virtue and glorify God better, because we have a chance to love more heroically. Family life truly is the school where we learn to color in the outline of the image of God in which we were created.

This is why many forces in modern culture are trying desperately to extinguish family life. Those forces are anti-Christian and anti-God. They resent the fact that God is God and they are not, and so they delight in disfiguring the image of God, the human family.

This is the real reason behind the immoral movement towards legally recognizing homosexual unions as equivalent to marriages. 

It is the real reason behind the efforts to expand abortion laws throughout the world, to promote contraception and pre-marital sex, to legalize adoption by homosexual couples, to expand no-fault divorce laws, to legalize euthanasia so as to be able to dispose of the elderly when they get inconvenient. 

All of these trends claim to promote human freedom and dignity. But in fact, whether their promoters realize it or not, they are direct attacks against human freedom and dignity.

You can pull the wheels off a car and make a pedestal out of the tires. You can rip out the engine, smash it up, and put it on top of the pedestal. You can peel off the frame, tear it to pieces, twist the pieces into fascinating, contorted shapes, and arrange them as decorations around the smashed engine and slashed tires. And if you do, you may have an award-winning piece of post-modern art – but that car will never again make it out of the driveway. 

God wants us to make it out of the driveway and to cruise all the way home to heaven. Today, let's decide once again to follow his instructions.