Life Mission

A while back, after Barbara was born and I had this intense need to reorganize my life and home, I made a "goals" binder, in which I wrote my life goals and made a worksheet to fill out periodically with goals divided into Spiritual/Marriage & Family/Financial/Physical/Intellectual/Social/Projects. Anal? Maybe, but if I had done something like that in a work situation it would be considered smart and productive, so why not apply the same thing to my new work at home as my own boss?

Anyhow, my life goal is pretty "simple" (in form, not in difficulty): to strive to get to heaven, and to do everything in my power to help my husband and kids get to heaven as well. At first I thought having that overarching goal would make it easy to then take any given thing in my life and compare it to that goal to say, "Is this helping or hindering me from reaching that goal?" Sounds simple enough, right?

The only problem with this is that there is so much grey area. Do violin lessons for my child help them or hinder them from getting to heaven? How about the preschool coop I'm doing with Jimmy? Would our time be better spent taking him to talk to people in a nursing home? You could spend hours agonizing over what would be the best use of your time and there would still always be a better use of time out there. You might end up praying for hours on end, because you felt it was the best way to help you get to heaven. But a Mom in the real world can not do that. A big part of the Christian mission is to be out in the real world interacting with others.

So this morning I was thinking about this again in the shower, and I thought, it doesn't matter so much the WHAT you are doing every day, but the HOW. It's not a question of whether or not I should go out for coffee with some other moms or if there's something better I should be doing (not that I belabor that decision- I'm speaking theoretically!) What matters is am I getting together with these other Moms and gossiping about other people, in front of my kids? Am I doing all the stupid menial work I sometimes hate out of love for my family, and making a nice home that they will feel comfortable in, or am I doing it with an attitude of self-pity and indignation? You don't have to be doing something special or something overtly religious to be doing something meaningful. You bring the meaning. So when I measure my life against my life goal, what I need to measure is not the things I am doing, but the attitude and manner in which I do them.