Week 11

These are what I came up with. I'd love some feedback, don't really know what I'm doing.

Core Values

-Loving God:
This looks like putting God’s desires for your life first, pursuing Him in everything and listening to His Spirit on every issue, intentionally unpacking your identity in His kingdom and growing to be the person He designed you to be, and living in constant intimacy and worship of who He is, transforming both who you are as a person and the environment around you.

-Unconditional Relationships:
This looks like committing yourself to relationships that God has graced, doing whatever is possible on your part- including communication, loyalty, forgiveness, boundaries, etc.- to keep the relationship healthy and happy as well as calling you to a higher standard in the kingdom of God, fighting when necessary and savoring as often as possible.

-Stewardship:
This is valuing and stewarding responsibly everything that God has given you, including your relationships, your physical health, your time, your money and possessions, your gifts and talents, your dreams, your children, and (especially) your spiritual walk. (What qualifies as good stewardship may change per category, but this also implies that you will seek God for wisdom on how to steward wisely and in the way that He would want you to.)

-Integrity:
This is walking according to your moral standard and core values even when no one is looking. It is responsibility, refusing a victim mentality, striving to always be true to who you know you are, willing to take on whatever yoke God puts before you, striving to always represent the heart of God, and walking in righteousness.

-Adventure:
This is enjoying the life God has given you by allowing yourself to experience it. It is not allowing yourself to be too legalistic about your other values- recognizing their seriousness, but also the importance of grace and it is allowing and prioritizing fun as a “normal life” kind of thing, as you find a way to make adventurous what others would consider mundane.

I've spent a significant amount of time on identify my core values & writing a mission statement.I am grateful for this assignment, because it has drawn me back to the foundation. It is challenging to keep the core things first, and to make agenda decisions based on those core values.

First this is a quote I really like (and I can't tell you for sure where I read it... my bad)

"The only way I can get rid of the pain is to do something about the gap between what I am doing and what I have placed a value on."

Identifying what we place value on is crucial.

Rather than list my core values, I will post my personal mission statement:

I am a friend of God: in Him I live and move and have my being. Loving God and enjoying Him is the most fundamental expression of my life.

I am a dedicated, respectful and passionately sustaining wife -- for life!

I freely give myself to becoming the essence of motherhood, to fully reveal God's design and purpose for motherhood. I accept the responsibility of nurturing and training my children to live from the strength of joy, returning to joy when disrupted. And I embrace the responsibility of managing and overseeing their education.

I genuinely treasure Christian community and seek to release the Spirit of God into my relationships, that my friends and I can truly experience unity and lifetime relationship in Christ.

I willingly accept the responsibility of a leader in Christian community; both consciously placing myself under authority and stepping up to exercise authority when given to me.

I am a responsible steward of my body, blessing my health with exercise, rest and nourishment.

I am a disciplined business owner, tenaciously and relentlessly pursuing personal and professional growth.

I am a warrior-bride,who with violent passion, seeks the restoration of all things to Christ Jesus. I tenaciously lay hold of the divine mystery and revelation behind the "common-ness" of life -- seeking to understand it and to reveal it to those around me that they may be drawn into the glory of His kingdom.

(just FYI, I didn't just write that, In 2010 it took me several hours, over a few weeks to distill my roles and values into a statement with which I deeply resonated. And now, I think it is time to hone it more. It still resonates, but I think I could refine it to be an even more visceral yes!)