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Reading time – 4 min, 15 seconds    
 

Building a Legacy for Our Family

(Our author, Alicia Patterson, has a BA in English Lit and an MA in Religion as well. She has been a teacher and pastor, but her current focus is mothering her four wonderful children: Gable, 12, Nathan, 10, Aaron, 6, and Ariel, 2, as well as supporting her husband, Geoff. She is also a businesswoman, writer, and inspirational speaker. Alicia writes from Kennesaw, GA, where she hopes one day to master map-reading skills.)


I hate to start with a confession, but I will -- just to make a point.

A couple of summers ago I set out on a trip -- just me, my three boys and our 6-month old baby daughter.  We were gone for three weeks, covered 7 states . . . and I never had a map in the car. Just hand-written directions from my husband (or the last friend we spent the night with).

It actually worked fine -- (well, except for that time we crossed the Ohio River on an obscure little ferry from Kentucky into Illinois and got lost on a backroad. There was about an hour there when it would have been really nice to have had a map. Actually, now that I’m reflecting on it, there might have been one or two other times when a good map with a nicely highlighted route would have come in pretty handy. .  .)

But back to my point. If you don’t exactly know where you’re going and how it differs from what’s around you, how can you tell if you’re headed in the right direction? “You can’t, lady,” I hear you say (kindly, I hope), "that’s why I carry a map (or a GPS) in my car.”

Good! It only makes sense that if you’re in the car with your family you should have a map, a mission, and a clear set of directions. So let me ask you a question: Why is it that so many of the families you and I talk to seem to be on this journey we call life without a map, a mission and a clear set of directions? We know in general what we want and don’t want --  we don’t want our kids on drugs, we want a healthy, functional family, we don’t want our kids in therapy the rest of their lives, we want them to succeed, to make a difference in their world.  But how do we get there from here? What will it look like? How can we tell if we’re headed in the right direction?

If you don’t know the answer to those questions for your family, you’re not alone. Most children lack a clear and compelling family vision that is multi-generational in scope. They are largely unaware of who they are and why they're here. They are missing an anchor, a sense of purpose in their lives. But it doesn’t have to be that way!

I want to share with you some tools that have really helped my husband, Geoff, and me create passion in our children by providing a clear vision for our family. We attended a Family Vision Workshop where we learned to take the time to discuss, reflect, and write down the answers to some pretty basic questions, such as:

1. Why is our family here? What do we contribute to the world?
   
2. What values do we want to pass on to our kids and to have them pass on to their kids?
   
3. What vision do we want to cast for our family? Something bigger than living for ourselves... 

First we gave the mission statement a try: “Why are we here? What unique contribution do we make to the world?”

To help us answer these questions, we took a mental journey back through our family lines, looking for similar themes. What were our families known for (that we wanted to continue!)? What were they good at? We found a lot of leaders, preachers, public speakers, and teachers. We made notes on what we learned. At first Geoff and I worked on this part of the project by ourselves, but later we found it was helpful to involve the children, too.

Next we talked to our parents on both sides, “Mom, Dad, we’re working on discovering the purpose for our family and then making it clear to our kids. Tell us what values you wanted to pass on to us. What was really important to you to instill in us when we were growing up?” They answered things like, “Honesty,” and “Gratitude.” We made a list of what they said and then wrote down what we wanted to add or subtract from that list. 

Now, I’m going to be straight with you here. It took a while for my husband and me to come up with an agreed-upon list. We’re both pretty opinionated people. But we did it! And you can, too. Just keep coming back to it until you’ve got something you both can live with.

Our vision statement grew out of the literature of our faith: We found a statement that was both practical and very visual. In the beginning it says “Do all things without complaining or arguing,” and it ends with a beautiful metaphor of “shining like stars in the universe…” This has been helpful, for example, when riding in the van together and things get a little rowdy: “Hey, kids, we’re not living up to who we were made to be! If we’re complaining and arguing with each other…that’s like slinging mud on each other. How can we shine if we do that?”

Our family motto, “Shine like crazy!” grew out of those discussions. We have told the kids that stars and knights in shining armor are special to our family, that whenever we see the stars we will be reminded of who we are and of what we were gifted to bring to the world.

We keep our mission, vision, and values before us in several ways:

We’ve made a family album that has our family mission, vision, and values presented in a beautiful format and as we come across stories or movies or pictures that illustrate what it is we’re trying to accomplish we put those in there, too. We keep it on a table by the couch.

We have printed and framed the family mission, vision, and values statements and hung them in a prominent place in our home. We’ve also memorized them, and frequently go over them together.

We’ve discovered that a good time for us to talk about them is in the evening as the children are getting ready for bed. Geoff or I will ask, “Which of our family values do you think we did well on today, and which do we need to work on?” (They know them by memory and we have talked about what each of them means.) I am amazed at how consistently the value they pick to work on is the one that I would have picked for them. Geoff and I always tell which one we’ll be working on too. (Somehow "patient" and "joyful" seem to be recurring themes.)

We try to refer to our mission and values when real-life situations come up because those seem to be good teachable moments.

They say that when an airplane leaves the airport it is off course 90 percent of the time, but because the pilots have programmed the intended course into the instruments, the plane is constantly adjusting itself... a little to the east, a little to the north...and so it is able to reach its destination correctly and on time.

Do you know why your family is here? What would your children answer if they were asked that question? Do you and your family have clear and specific goals for the future? A vision? Remember that the world needs what only your family can bring. Get really clear on that dream, and not only your family, but all of us will benefit!