Provide. Protect. The New Norm 3

Any athlete or sports person didn’t wake up the fastest man or women or earth, they worked for it. Training day in and day out, with a goal in their minds of what they wanted to achieve. A football team doesn’t reach the top of the premier league without understanding they must train, train, train. In our families, if we want to see them grow as individuals, and us to succeed as a family, we firstly have to define what success actually looks like as a family. Is success putting food on the table? Or buying a new TV, or car, or going out for meals? Or is success providing the best environment for each member to be the very best version of themselves, for children to have the best opportunity to grow up emotionally stable individuals chasing their dreams and purposes? When the goal for our family is only material, we miss the joy and purpose of family altogether. Family is not a room and a bed, with too many mouths that need feeding, and children who make too much noise. Family is the best possible opportunity for individuals to grow into inredible adults with the entire world of options ahead of them.

As adults, as men and women leading families, we need to take time to properly decide what is the purpose, goal of our family. What do we want our family to be like? Without a goal, our families will naturally become the worst version of themselves, without discipline and direction, the individuals in the family don’t flourish.

Provision for our families is providing direction, purpose and a goal. Provision is using that goal to help every individual in the family work out how they fit, how they grow, how they are loved. If buying a computer helps to develop better educational opportunities for the children, because learning is a part of our family values, then we buy the computer. We shouldn’t accumulate material assets for their own sake.

Similarly a loving family with structure and purpose works together to decide how they relate to each other. How will we talk to each other, spend time together, work through disagreements and develop times of fun? Positive family values do not usually appear by accident, and they often fall apart as the pressures of life take a hold. Sitting together and deciding what to value as a family, helps navigate the hard times of life, exhaustion and laziness. Each member of the family can point to the family values, and say wait, we said we would eat our evening meals together, and everyone agreed, so lets go back to that. Or another member can point to those family values and say, but we promised each other that we would say sorry when we hurt each other, so lets keep to that.

The possibilities and opportunities for a family with purpose and direction, and a set of family values to guide it, will not shelter it from everything that comes along in life, but it will provide an amazing habour of safety. Provision is helping our families have purpose, for without it, no one really succeeds.

  • anyone who truly wants to succeed must work at it
  • no family just happens to be brilliant, amazing, loving, sincere and vulnerable with each other by accident
  • success takes hard work, so does Family
  • success in family however propels the individuals within it to achieve success in the world
  • success in businesses and our workplaces does not automatically transcend into our families