Mission-Minded Motherhood

A re-post from last year since I'm in the process of setting goals for the semester!!!  Up next, I'll share my semester goal planning sheet with you all.  Since my goals encompass far more than merely academics, I really enjoy sitting down and praying through what my goals are in a variety of areas for each of my children... Enjoy this post in the meantime.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I’m a visionary. Give me a lofty goal to shoot for and I’ll put everything I have into it. Put blinders on me and ask me to just take things one step at a time with no goal and I flounder.

Since I view my role as a parent as one of my primary vocations, I decided that I needed to have a mission statement in place to remind myself of my end goal. Why am I doing what I’m doing? Why is it so important that I stay home with my boys?

Anyone with small children knows, raising them and maintaining your sanity certainly isn’t easy… For those days when the whining never stops, there are unending disputes to settle or I’ve changed my 5th poopy diaper of the day, it’s nice to be able to maintain (or regain) some perspective.

“Without vision, the people perish”                 Proverbs 28:19

My mommy brain suffers from this on those REALLY bad days. Ever have one? You know, the kind of day where you just want to crawl out of your skin and run away. Ok, ok, that maybe a bit melodramatic, but you get my point, right?

So I remind myself of who God has called me to be – both as a person and as a mother to these boys. Reminding myself of the big picture brings me back into balance!

I wrote my first mission statement two years ago and it has been interesting to go back and read my thoughts. I’ve made some tweaks and added a new goal to the bunch, so here you go!

I desire to live holistically, authentically - meaning that I want my core values to play a critical role in every decision that I make. I want to live what I believe instead of merely having a piecemeal/compartmentalized approach to life. This undergirds my goals as a parent and really as a human being.

I have three primary interrelated goals:

1. That my children would have a deep and abiding relationship with Jesus Christ,
2. That they would have a genuine love for other people,
3. That they would be joyful, life-long learners.

I’ll write more about each of these aspects later and give a more detailed explanation on how I hope to build these goals into my everyday life and not just have it be a random thing that I mark off a ‘to-do’ list.

Mission-Minded - Part 2, Part 3, Part 4