Photo by Elena Mozhvilo on Unsplash

December is a unique, special month.

There are parties to attend, gifts to buy, cards to send, food to make and eat, and memories to be made. Kids will be off from school, parents will be off from work, and Christmas specials will be on TV.

If you plan as a parent, you can make December a special month.

Here are some ideas:

Listen to Christmas music. I’m not a big fan of Christmas music. If you know me, this isn’t news. However, starting at Thanksgiving, we listen to it almost non-stop until Christmas. Why? It is a good tradition.

Take your kids out. Go to a park, go to Starbucks for a treat, and play a game or whatever they decide (within reason). You can use this time to get a gift for their siblings or others in your life. This can also be a time for you to help them process the past year and what you have experienced as a family.

Record Christmas specials and watch them together. Kids love Christmas specials. At least my kids do. So, record them (or pull them up on Netflix and Disney+) and watch them together. The memories this creates are incredible for your family.

The tree. Whether you go out and cut down your tree, buy one, or have a fake one, make putting up the tree special. Build it up, plan it, make your ornaments, tell stories about the ornaments you are putting up, and listen to Christmas music.

Do a special outing as a family. Some families go caroling or sledding. Some shop on Black Friday together. Many families in New England see lights, check out Christmas Markets, or see A Christmas Carol. Whatever you do, do something together and create traditions.

Eat special (and bad for you) food. I’m a health nut about what I eat. At the holidays, I ease off the gas pedal on that. Eat an extra dessert. Have the same thing each year to create a tradition. At our house on Christmas Eve, we make cream of crab soup and have chocolate fondue for dessert. We don’t make it any other time, so it is extra special.

Get pajamas. This is a popular one, but it creates a rhythm for your family around the holidays.

Celebrate Advent. One of our favorites is Counting the Days, Lighting the Candles: A Christmas Advent Devotional.

Slow down and be together. Years from now, your kids will remember very little about life as a child, but they will remember if you were there. So will you. Don’t miss it. Work isn’t that important. That party isn’t that important. Shopping for one more thing isn’t important if it keeps you from being with those you love (unless you do that together). I’ve been reminded recently by the illnesses of close friends of the brevity of life.

Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash

Do you know that you have a goal for your family if you’re a parent or grandparent?

Of course, you do; we all do.

But can you articulate it?

Years ago, when Katie and I started having kids, we would talk a lot about our kids’ goals, hopes, and dreams, as all parents do. But we had watched plenty of families never reach those goals; we had watched great ideas flame out. Why?

Before I tell you, take a moment to answer this simple question: What is the goal for your family?

Maybe you aren’t able to put it into words, but that’s okay. Here are a few examples I’ve seen over the years:

• For some, the goal is to have fun, not to get too serious.
• For many married couples, their goal is simply to stay married. To survive. Not to be happy, not to be in love, but to survive.
• Some parents aim for their kids to grow up and have everything they didn’t have.
• For some parents, their goal is for their kids not to do anything stupid or embarrassing.
• In some cases, the goal is to get too close because of a background of abuse or abandonment. To have a relationship with their child that they didn’t have with their parents. 
• In some families, it is about keeping the peace or one person happy.
• For others, it is to take care of one family member.
• For other families, their goal is centered around school, getting into the right college, and doing the right steps.
• For others, it is all about sports, scholarships, and winning.

Now, depending on the season of life, the goal for our family might change. And even as you read through the list above, those aren’t bad goals. There are a lot of good things on that list. But, most people have never articulated their goal or even agreed on it with their spouse. Then, you start working towards something, your spouse works towards something else, and you find yourself pulling against each other, which leads to all kinds of disagreements and frustrations.

If you’re following along with our Future Family series at CCC, I’d encourage you to sit down with your spouse and work through your goal for your family. As we move through this series, we’ll help build that out and bring more focus. In week 6 of this series, I’ll share one of the most important things Katie and I have ever done in our family. 

Once you articulate your goal, here’s a question that I think is a little harder: Is it the right goal?

If we aren’t careful, we can go after the wrong goal in our family and figure it out too late.

That’s why it is so important to make sure you have a clear goal, and it is the one you want to go after in your family.

You might wonder, is there a universal goal for families? That depends.

As followers of Jesus, we are to be image bearers of Jesus and reflect Him to the world around us. This means when people look at your family, parenting, and grandparenting, they should think, “I bet that’s how God parents us.”

Put simply, as a follower of Jesus, your family’s goal is to reflect the heart of God.

One of the clearest pictures of that is in Luke 15, in the story of the prodigal son. We meet a family, a father and two sons in the story. The younger son comes and asks his father for his inheritance. In this culture, the oldest son received 2/3 of what the father had when the father died. Notice the father isn’t dead. The remaining children received what was left after that. This son says, “I want mine now before you are dead.” He is telling his father, I wish you were dead. Maybe you’ve said that to a family member, maybe someone has said that to you, so you can understand the intensity of this moment. The father, instead of arguing, gives it to him. Which means he would’ve had to sell land. In this culture focused on the father, the people hearing this story would’ve been blown away by the son’s audacity. The younger son leaves, takes his money, lives it up, and spends it all. Then a famine comes to the land he is in. He is at the bottom, so hungry that he wants to eat the food pigs eat.

The younger son drags himself home. I imagine he is incredibly humiliated by this. 

The text tells us that while the son was a ways off, the father ran out to meet him, threw his arms around him, and kissed him. Then, he threw a party for the son who had returned. 

The older brother, who stayed home, and followed the rules, was the dutiful, responsible one, is furious. Maybe you can imagine your family now and see the different people and their roles. 

Tim Keller, in his great book The Prodigal God: Recovering the Heart of the Christian Faith, said of this passage, “both sons missed the father because neither wanted the father, only what they could get from him.”

In this story, Jesus shows us the heart of God. God’s heart is for us. God gives us our choices and freedoms no matter where they will lead us, but when we come home, God runs out to meet us, throws his arms around us, and brings us home through his grace. That heart should be reflected in how we parent and relate to each other in our families. 

One of the things that I hear from lots of parents, and I’ve felt this at different times, is a sense of wondering if they are winning as parents. But, unfortunately, most parents feel like we are losing, like we are pushing uphill as a parent.

And let’s be honest. Parenting is hard work. It is overwhelming. Most of the time, we are simply trying to keep up, trying to stay up to speed on what our kids are dealing with. We are walking through the challenges they have, protecting them, but also allowing them to blossom.

The question then becomes, is there a way to do that? Is there a way to move in the same direction as a family? With your spouse? After all the stress, the late nights, the slammed doors, and hurt feelings, how do you keep your family moving forward?

If you ask most pastors or business leaders about how they would do that at church, they will talk about their mission statement and core values. They would say, “This is why my church exists, why my business exists, this is what we do, how we interact with each other.” But then, they go home and don’t use any of that knowledge with their family.

Almost ten years ago, Katie and I went through a practice that changed our family. It put us on the same page as a couple, helped to define who our family is and what we hoped our family would become.

It all started when I read Patrick Lencioni’s book Three Questions for a Frantic Family. In it, he walks through how to use what businesses and churches do in creating a mission statement and values, and how to do that in your family. I also recount some of the processes in my book Breathing Room: Stressing Less, Living More. 

Maybe you’re wondering, “Is this worth the time? Will it matter?”

If you don’t do this, you and your family personally wander around aimlessly. How do you make a decision when both options seem good? Without a mission statement, you guess and hope you are right. With a mission statement, decisions become more straightforward. You are also able to evaluate things more clearly.

One of the things it helped Katie and me define is what we hope our kids know when they leave our house. What kind of adults do we want to send out into the world? I think too many parents are trying to raise kids when we need to think about raising adults. So for us, it defined what we mean when we say, “We want to launch five healthy, mature adults who love Jesus.”

Now, here is the beauty of a mission statement and your values.

Ready?

They are yours! You get to decide. You are in charge of your family. It comes out of your passions and who you are, how you and your kids are wired. The things that matter to us as a family may not matter to you, and that is okay. There isn’t a one size fits all formula for raising kids or launching adults.

Start by listing all the things that describe your family. Not what you hope your family or life is, but who you are. What is important to you? What matters most? What things will you fight until death? This list should be exhaustive. You are listing everything you can think of.

Now, start paring it down. Are there words that mean the same thing or can be combined? You are looking for about five words to describe your family or you personally. You want it to be short enough to fit on a T-shirt, so you remember it.

This is the hard part but don’t stress about this part. Instead, look for the ones that stand out to you, that resonate deeply within you.

Then, you want to put it into some sentence form. Something that says, “This is why our family exists. These are the kinds of adults we are hoping to launch into the world.”

Now, let me suggest a bold step at this point.

Then, share it with a friend, someone who knows your family well, and ask them, “Is this our family? Is this who we are?” This is scary but very important. When we did this, our friends pointed out a missing word, and it was incredibly helpful for us.

Once you have it, live with it for a bit. Then, look at it to see if you are making decisions with that in mind. See if it resonates with who you are as a family.

Once that is in place, put it on your wall so you will see it regularly. Ours hangs on a mirror in our dining room so that others see it, but also so we can talk it through during family dinners and see how we’re doing at living out our values.