How to create Family Values
A free downloadable guidebook
A PDF guide is available for download at the bottom of this article
A friend told me a story years ago that has stuck with me ever since, and it is incredibly relevant to building a family culture and raising children.
A knight is riding through a forest. Every few miles he passes a tree marked with an arrow dead center of a painted bullseye. He sees this once, then again, then again. After a while he starts to get worried that there must be a very talented archer hanging around these woods. He keeps riding. Eventually he comes around a bend and finds the source. It is a jester. The jester is firing arrows into trees, walking up to wherever they happen to stick, and painting a bullseye around them. Turns out he was not very good at aiming. He was just very good at celebrating the spot his arrow happened to land.
As I have gotten older, it has become easy to see the arrows as my kids. After all, the Bible talks about having a quiver full as a massive blessing. They are with you for a short time. The drawing back of the bowstring is the preparation. Eventually they are hurled forward into the unknown. Have we given them something to aim at? Have we prepared them well? Have we told them what a bullseye looks like in their life? Or are we firing without aiming, allowing them to fly, and then rushing to paint a bullseye around wherever they land? That is the difference between values you have chosen and values that have chosen you.
For a long time, Corinne and I were the jester, and we knew it. We talked about it for ten years. We kept starting lists in Evernote, not one of them was ever finished. We told ourselves we would do it once the kids were a little older, or once the schedule slowed down, or once we had enough years of family life to actually know what our values were. The kids kept getting older, the schedule never slowed down, and the values were already operating in our home whether we had named them or not.
What kept stopping us was that we had no guide. We knew what we wanted to produce, but we had no process to produce it. Every time we sat down to start, the size of the task overwhelmed us.
But! I am happy to report, that a few weeks ago we finally got it done. We took a weekend away, worked through it on the back porch and on a long hike, and came home with a rough draft. It is not a polished document but a first version that we will keep refining for the rest of our lives as a family. Trust me, that is the right way to think about it. The work was less daunting than we feared once we had a process to follow.
The frame is this. Our vision is the target. Our values are the signposts that tell us whether we are still pointed at it.
Your vision is the kind of family you are trying to be, the kind of people your kids will become if everything goes well. Your values are the signposts that get you there. If your values are true of you, and you keep your head down and try to live them out every day, one day you will wake up and realize that your vision has come to life. Your values are the distillation of your vision.
Whatever your vision is, you then have to reverse-engineer the rest. What type of family is that? What do they do every day? How do they treat one another? What do they value, what do they encourage, what do they refrain from? Those questions are how you understand and know what your values should be. The vision pulls and the values point, and you walk one day at a time toward something you can finally see.
Ours came down to four words: Safe. Set apart. Sent.
Safe, because a home that runs on unconditional love is the place where children can try to be all that God created them to be, without fear of rejection or failure.
Set apart, because God is holy and set apart, and we are made in His image, which means we should strive to be like Him in a world that wants us to be like everything else.
And Sent, because while our home is the training ground it is only a temporary stop on their journey. We want to prepare them for the world and also raise the kind of kids the whole world would be grateful for: kids who serve, love, give, and sacrifice. We want this whole process to be intentional. They don’t leave our home. They are sent to make theirs out in the world.
Underneath the vision sit seven values, each anchored in Scripture and built around phrases our kids can memorize. Every value comes from our relationship with Christ, and the thing that helps us live them out each day is the power of the Holy Spirit working in us. We did not collect these values because they were good ideas. We pulled them out of Scripture because they came from Him.
If you have been telling yourself for years that you should write something like this, and you have not done it, the guide below is for you. It is the process we used, built into four sessions you can work through on a weekend away or over four evenings at home. You will not finish a polished document by the end of the weekend, but you will come away with a rough draft worth refining. That is the part most couples never reach.
The arrows are going to fly. The only question is whether you are aiming.
Free download: Creating your Family Values
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Currently, I serve as the Executive Director of Them Before Us, advocating globally for the rights and well-being of children.
I am also the co-founder of All The Good, a leadership organization helping non-profits do all the good they are called to do.
I studied Cross-Cultural Ministry and Humanitarian and Disaster Leadership at Messiah and Wheaton. I read a lot and sleep less than I probably should.
My wife and I live in Charlotte, North Carolina with our 4 kids.
