Stress as a Family

    This week we have talked about stress but mostly stress within families. I thought it was a very interesting topic to talk about.    

    One thing I really liked doing was comparing external and internal stresses. We talked about how external stresses we are more likely to work together as a family and become more united when there is a stress. When there is internal stress families tend to come disconnect and not work together to help overcome the success. When we went over the different examples I definitely  thought that the internal stressors where harder than the external. There was some externals that were definitely worse then internal. I honestly think it depends on how you deal with the stress and who you work with to deal with it.

    A couple of years ago my family went through a pretty hard trial. My parents decided after living in our house for 12 years it was time to move. They loved the city we were in and the school district we were in so they wanted to move somewhere close. We decided to move across the freeway and actually be closer to our schools. My parents found a home to build in this beautiful area and would only be a 5 minute walk to my high school. About a couple weeks later my mom had a strong feeling to pull out of the house and stop building it even though we sold our house. My grandparents were kind enough to live with them while we waited to find a place to stay. The first night at my grandparents my mom had a huge headache. Side note she has never had headaches before and just thought it was stress from moving. In the middle of the night her headache was in so much pain she had my dad take her to the emergency room. They found out my mom had a bunch of blood vessels tangled in a note and blood was leaking in her head. They told her and my dad that she would need brain surgery but they need to wait for some of the blood to be observed first. I remember how scared my family was. We fasted, prayed and did all we can to help my mom as a family. She went into her surgery and it went well, but when she came out they told my dad that they saw something on the other side of the brain that they couldn't take out at the time. I remember how much stress my family was going through. My mom was going to take a long time to heal and get better and after a month she had another surgery and found out it was a non cancer tumor. I took my mom about a year and a half to get back to being her normal self. This was a huge, scary, stressful experience for my family but I believed it helped bring my family closer together. I helped out my family a lot by taking care of my siblings, cleaning and doing anything my grandparents or parents needed me to do. I remember spending so much time with my siblings and how much love we had for each other. We knew at this time that we needed to work together and love each other. 

This was a huge experience for my family. My mom is okay now but that stress helped us be closer and helped me learn to serve others and be super grateful for all the help from others and the love and support and blessing we receive from God and all our family and friends. I believe stress can help motivate you and bring you and others close together even though in the time it seems really hard.