Our Family Manifesto

Over the last couple of years I have realized again and again the importance of having a vision for your life and your family that you are working towards. But it is only really in the last few months that I have been intentional with creating a more detailed mission statement for myself and my family.

With Leigh Ann Dutton’s help in her wonderful ebook, Live for Him: A Grace-Filled Look at Planning, I have been working out the details and daring to dream. I have been setting goals, both short- and long-term, and I have been figuring out my priorities and what they mean my day-to-day life ends up looking like.

I found it refreshing, invigorating and exciting to work out my own mission statement. I prayed through it, worked hard on it, and am still figuring out some of the finer points.

But our family manifesto was a very different experience. While in the process of reading Notes from a Blue Bike by Tsh Oxenreider, I had a prayer time where I felt a need, a deep desire, to write. I grabbed my journal and asked God what He was speaking to me in that moment.

And it poured out of me like honey.

I wrote quickly, barely taking in the words of my own heart, desperate not to let any of them slip through my fingers.

When I reached the end of my prayer time, I read through what I had written, and I sighed with relief. The Spirit had done in me what I could not on my own: It had given me words to describe the vision that had captured me, and my husband, during the course of our engagement and marriage.

I thrust the journal into my husband’s hands eagerly, hopeful that the words would speak to him as powerfully as they had to me. He read calmly, put the journal down, and turned to me.

“It’s perfect.”

Another sigh of relief escaped me. As different as we are, the things that are most important to each of us are things we share, and this manifesto captured them all.

Perhaps there will be more to add and change, as with my own personal mission statement. But, at least for now, this is the life our family feel called to, the one we pray for and strive for. The one we organize our life around, that influences our decisions, whether big or small.

It might look very different for you and your family. We are all called to different things. We share different passions. And I encourage you to both pray hard, and to sign up to Leigh Ann’s newsletter at Intentional By Grace to receive your free copy of Live for Him: A Grace-Filled Look at Planning, to help you find out what it looks like for you.

But this is what it looks like for us.

(Credit where credit is due – much inspiration generally, but also specifically in this manifesto, has come to me from Intentional By Grace: “Every Need Is Not Your Calling”; Chatting at the Sky/Emily P. Freeman: “We Will Make Art”; and Notes from a Blue Bike by Tsh Oxenreider: “Do the choices I make line up with how I really want to live?”)