Why do you think God, in Isaiah 6, gave His reluctant prophet a vision of Himself “sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up,” where the train of His robe “filled the temple”? Why did God reveal to him angels with six wings, worshiping at such high volume that the doorposts of the throne room began to shake and the whole place filled with smoke, as one of these creatures flew down and touched Isaiah’s lips with a live coal from the altar, declaring his sins forgiven, commissioning him to bold service as a spokesman of the Lord?
Why such a vision? Why be so descriptive and detailed? Why did God create us to respond to vision? What’s so important about having a vision for your family?
Tell you what: if vision feels like too airy of a word, just think of it as a mental picture image of what you want your family to be. What desires do you have for your marriage and your children . . . what does that image look like to you?
See, I believe you’ve already got one. Though you perhaps haven’t tried capturing it and solidifying it, I think a general picture image of what you want for your children and family is already in your head. Trouble is, it may only be like that big boilerplate of hopes and dreams I gave you at the beginning of this blog series. The picture image may be all jumbled up in a haze of commonly accepted expectations that just kind of settle around us as parents without our really thinking about it—all those typical things we’re supposed to want to see happen in our children’s lives.
But in order to lead your family in the direction where God, through those values of yours, is specifically trying to take you, they need a statement of vision from you that can give them something to rally around and shoot for—a vision that will keep drawing them back like a magnet to their roots and core purpose. Your vision for your family will help them see that God is actually taking you guys somewhere special as you live out life together. It’s the part your family is meant to play as a vital part of His family.
Vision statements. If the thought of sitting down to craft a brief vision statement for your family makes you suddenly eager to go out and clean the garage or to do some other menial task you’ve been putting off all summer, trust me—you’re in good company. I can appreciate the avoidance, the diversionary tactics. But I assure you, if that’s the case, you’re viewing this job as harder and more painful than it really is.
Because, hey, you’re not drafting the Magna Carta here, or the Declaration of Independence. There’s no right statement or wrong statement. There’s only your statement—your way of expressing, in as few words as possible, what you want to see your family becoming by God’s grace and power. Think of it like this: Your list of values helps define who you are. And when armed with a more concrete grasp of who you are, your vision statement can now describe what you hope to accomplish as you live out those values.
So start there. With your values (see my last post for more details – Values Drive Decisions – Victorious Family). Write them down. Take them into prayer with you. Ask God to help you reduce this vital information about what you, your family, and His Word deem to be important into a single statement that pulls all of it together into a compact carrying size.
Again, doesn’t need to be Christian-speak. Doesn’t need to blow people away with your grasp of the language. Just needs to be yours. Needs to reflect what your family is all about and what you, as the spiritual leader, sense to be the main purpose for why God has put you all together in this fashion, at this time, with this background, with these values, and with a fresh new desire to be dead center—every single one of you—directly in the middle of His will.
Vision guides the way. For everything.
Now I’m not going to tell you what our vision statement is. I’m always afraid, by being any more specific than this, I’ll trend somebody in a direction they wouldn’t have gone otherwise. It’s not because I’m uncomfortable with our vision statement, nor is it because our statement is any more special than anybody else’s. It’s just ours. Yours will be different. But I will tell you, even though our vision statement is no more than a couple of dozen words, I’ve baked it down even further into a four-word motto, which simply says: Unity in the Spirit. This, in a nutshell, is what I want for us. It’s what I believe my wife, my kids, and I always need to fight for and maintain in order to steward our faith well and to keep it continuing on out into future generations. “Unity in the Spirit” is our family’s what. It’s what we’re going for. Always. In everything.
Because as is true of every family, we have our challenges. We have our disagreements. Small, medium, and large. We have the occasional breakdown in communication where one or another of us fails to understand what somebody else means or is trying to do. We’re a long way from having it all together, I can assure you.
But for more than twenty years, we’ve had a vision in place. Unity in the Spirit. And on those once in a while days when I’ve been upset about something, just not feeling like getting along with anybody, our family vision has often been the thing that has held me in check and brought me back to my senses.
I can think of more than one situation through the years where—again, like everybody—we were wrestling with a family issue that could easily have escalated into something that sent us off to our respective camps and opposite corners. But because we had a vision that we’d all agreed to embrace ahead of time, I’ve been able to say, “Guys, we’ve got to stay unified in the Spirit here. We don’t have to agree on everything, but whichever way this plays out, we still need to be unified, all right?”
That’s what a vision can do. It’s like glue. It keeps us all held in place, where we belong. This vision you establish is not just words on paper. It’s a living message. It’s something you can keep trotting out, in the middle of any crisis or decision moment, and lay it down like a yardstick or a carpenter’s level, just to remind each other, “This is who we are, and this is what we’ve promised to be and do—for each other, for our Lord, and for the generations who need us to be standing strong, long after we’ve forgotten what this little conflict was all about.”
Claim your vision. Put it in writing. It’s one of the greatest gifts you’ll ever give your family.
Comments are closed.