Read an Excerpt
What Really Matters?
A Kid's Guide to What's Really Important in Life
By John Mark Falkenhain, R. W. Alley Abbey Press
Copyright © 2013 Br. John Mark Falkenhain, O.S.B.
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4976-9302-9
CHAPTER 1
What REALLY Matters?
Something matters when it is important. Think of some of the things that are important to you: your baseball glove, your favorite game, your bicycle, or the doll your grandmother gave you.
You know something is important—that it matters—when you don't want to give it away. We tend to be extra careful with things that matter—with things that are important. We would be sad if we lost them. We would be upset if they broke.
Sometimes Things Are Important to Others
Some things might be important to other people, even if they don't matter to you. Your mother might say, "Be careful with that book. Your grandmother gave that to me when I was a little girl and it is my favorite book." That means it matters to her, even if you don't see what's so special about it.
Sometimes we accidentally hurt other people because we don't understand that something is important to them. If you accidentally ruin your brother's baseball glove by leaving it out in the rain, he will probably be very hurt and upset. You may not have been done it to be mean, but you may not have careful enough because you did not understand how important it was to him—how much it mattered to him.
What We Think Matters Can Change
As people grow up, different things become important and begin to matter more than others. When people are children, certain toys, games, and collections—like dolls or baseball cards—are important and matter a lot.
For grown-ups, cars, money, clothes, and houses can matter a lot. Grown-ups may have worked very hard for these things and so they are important, too. They matter.
How Do We Know What REALLY Matters?
Lots of things matter, but some things REALLY matter. How do we know what those things are?
One way of knowing if something REALLY matters is if we can't live without it.
Food really matters, and water really matters because we cannot live without them. That is why it is important—REALLY important—that we help those people around us who don't have enough food to eat or water to drink.
There are other things that REALLY matter that we don't always think about. For example, trees REALLY matter because they help make our air clean to breathe. And our houses and homes REALLY matter because they protect us from the rain and the cold. We could not live without either of these.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from What Really Matters? by John Mark Falkenhain, R. W. Alley. Copyright © 2013 Br. John Mark Falkenhain, O.S.B.. Excerpted by permission of Abbey Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
