Latest / The Rooted Family / Ep 27 | How to Begin Building Your Family Roots (The Values That Shape Your Home)
Transcript
- Christian Cornish: So I think one of the biggest mistakes families make today is trying to build a better schedule before they've decided who they want to become. Because before you decide what your family does, we must decide who our family is becoming. Christ. So Chris, if someone followed our family around for one week, but they couldn't hear a single conversation, what do you think they'd assume we care about? Well, we are definitely obsessed with coffee, because we go through a lot of coffee, slash we go work at coffee shops a lot. So there's a lot of coffee in our lives. So they probably think that we super love coffee. They definitely. know that we love pickleball. Yeah. Because if we're not playing it, we're watching it. They're probably like, wow, they're so good. Yeah, that would be a misconception, but they would probably think that. That's 100 % right. They definitely would believe dinner and family meal time is the center of our universe. Probably, yes. Because our family motto is we're always thinking about the next meal. And yes, we said that you can't talk, but it's very obvious. Well, and I feel like it's like kind of an obsession now of like sitting down for almost every meal. Like we're not just family dinner people anymore. We're like, we're going to sit down for breakfast, sit down for lunch. And they were going to be like, wow, they are obsessed with the dinner table. Yeah, absolutely. They would definitely say that we love reading books because there are books all over this house all the time getting left in. rando places and getting lots of notifications from the library that we are missing like 20 books. yeah, the library is very gracious to us, which is maybe a bad thing because I think that grace has led us to be even looser with returning things and we well, they end up they end up on the kids bookshelves and I'm like, okay, three times later they kind of feel like they're ours. and they would definitely notice how much we love the Sabbath and how Mark to that moment is every week for us and our family because it's I think there's just a different energy on those days. Not like a mystical, but you get what I'm saying. Yeah, like we're slower paced. We're more relaxed. That's a great way. We're more fun. Yeah, there's no moving from one thing to the next. Shuffling everybody out the door because they have to be somewhere on time. Yeah, it's just a more relaxed, like jammy chill. vibe, fun, for everybody. I would definitely say that. Yeah. So it's funny because I think people would make a lot of assumptions about what matters to our family based on what they are seeing. But honestly, they'd probably be right. Right. Because eventually what you value is what becomes visible. It's the things that you actually do. Totally. way you actually live. So today's episode is really about that. It's not what people see, but what produces everything they see. But before we jump in, if this podcast has encouraged you or your family, would you do us a huge favor and share this episode with a friend? Text it to a family member or anybody in your life who you know would value from our conversation today. And if you haven't already, please leave us a rating and review on Apple or Spotify. Wherever you're listening, it's really one of the biggest ways you can help us reach more families. All right, let's jump in. So I think one of the biggest mistakes families make today is trying to build a better schedule before they've decided who they want to become. Because before you decide what your family does, we must decide who our family is becoming. Christ. And honestly, we have spent many years just trying to fix our calendar. Or our efficiency. I mean, if you're in the business world at all, or like in your job, there's an obsession with finding faster, more efficient ways of doing things. So you can do more totally in the limited time that you have. And we've read so many books on like productivity hacks. how to be better with our time, almost kind of obsessing over how do we just be more intentional with our time or like fixing our morning routine or fixing meal plans or systems and schedules, which all these things are very helpful. And I think we still would say these are good things to learn about and to know about, But nothing really changed for us until we stopped asking the question, like, how do we organize our life or like, how do we make our life more efficient? And we started asking, who has God called our family to become? And so today we're introducing one of the biggest ideas behind everything that we teach on the Rooted Family Podcast. And honestly, everything that we are. passionate about here at Legacy Roots Co. So that is your family values determine your family rhythms or maybe better said the way we prefer to say it is your roots determine your rhythms. Yeah, so something that we have really clung to over the last several years is taking this idea of family values, or you might have even heard of values in your job and your company, and really turning that into this concept or this visual of having family roots, which are the very thing that your family is built upon. And so if you've listened to us talk about our various family rhythms like Sabbath or family meal planning, all these different things, intentional living. knowing your roots is where all of it begins. And the reason we have really clung to the word roots, as you said, is that visual because, you know, values is a strong word, so it's not to take away from that. but the visual of a strong tree that has roots that go so deep and they're deeper than you can see. they anchor that tree into the ground so that when the hard times come, when change comes, when there are storms in life, that tree isn't going anywhere. And so that is the reason we chose the word roots. And so Probably from here on out in the rest of the episode, you'll hear us use that word instead of values, but just to kind of say that upfront, if you've kind of heard that term family values before, we believe defining those values and then looking at your life as a family and saying, does our life reflect these values? Can you follow us around throughout the day and say, this is what this family stands for? and they actually live it out. And when we live in misalignment to that, we're all over the place. And not to mention, we're probably very unsatisfied in our life. And like you said earlier, Kayla, so wonderfully, it's easy to think, oh, I just need to be more efficient so I can live out my values as kind of the deepest desires of our soul. But in reality, we should be doing the opposite. we should say, here's who we are, here's our roots, and now we're gonna turn and build rhythms around living them out. Yeah, yeah, that's good because I think the easy trap to fall into is you might even be listening to this podcast and thinking, I hear about meal planning, so I need to jump on the meal planning bandwagon, or I feel like our bedtime rhythm is really crashing right now, and so I need to fix that, but. The thing is, is if you're just fixing rhythms but you're not addressing your family roots first, it's almost like you're putting a band-aid over the problem. You're not really getting to the root of the issue. And I just love thinking about a rooted family. The visual of a rooted family it's a family unit. that truly is unshakable. Like they can be hit with the wind and the rain and the storms, but that rooted family is not going anywhere. And I think it's because they're so clear on who they are about and who God has made this family unit to be. So I think that really brings us to point number one is that every family has roots. And I love what you said there about every family having roots and it's who God made you to be. And I want to be really clear about that too because I think that is something that we believe about the concept of roots that separates it from values. Like you can go pick your family values, but we believe your roots are actually who God rooted you all to be. And so we want you to discover We call it discover your roots because we want God to reveal them to you or for you to work with him to discover what they are. And every family has them. You are 100 % right. Yeah, and you might not have ever named them before, but we do believe that they are still there. And you probably, just by even having a quick conversation with your spouse, you probably could even come up with some ideas on what they are and put some words to it. But we do believe every family has roots, whether or not you've discovered them. I think it's just simply taking the time to talk about it and to name them and to really start to build your life around them more intentionally. Everyone is building their life around something, whether it's your achievements or sports or comfort, maybe it's adventure or having some sort of security, your faith, success. Something is always shaping your calendar and really dictating how you're spending your time. Like you could probably go back into your calendar the last month and just looking at all of the different calendar events that you have going on or things that you've intentionally scheduled. will give you a clear indicator of some of the routes that you might have. Now, you may have things in your calendar that you're like, okay, this is not who we want to be, but we're scheduling this a ton right now. Yeah, that's so true. But maybe by sitting down and having a conversation around this, you might gain clarity on maybe spending your time a little differently based on the things you actually care about. Yeah, and take this to the level of a Christian perspective. I think John Mark Homer and his book, God Has A Name, which is one of my absolute all time favorite books, he talks about the same kind of idea what you believe about God is the most important question to answer in your life because the rest of your life will be dictated. And he's like, if you don't ask that question, it's all happening. It's just subconscious. And this is the exact same thing we're talking about. You are building something at home and you can either be conscious about it or you can be unconscious about it. And when we're unconscious about it, what we don't realize is that we're worshiping probably comfort or we're worshiping our peace or our security or like sports or whatever it is, achievement. And we just don't even realize it. And so bringing it to your forefront and being conscious of it allows you to really say, wow, what do we really want to be about? And have an awareness to bring your life into that alignment with God. Yeah. And I think that's a really amazing and powerful thing for our family. Absolutely. Yeah. When we look back at the early years of our marriage, what do you think our schedule, in those early days were revealed about us? I've never said it this way, so I don't mean to say that, so don't catch you off guard. I think we really wanted to feel important. We were like, OK, let's let's start our own businesses. And then we were like, let's pastor a church. Let's hold this big small group at our house every single week for two years. Let's volunteer at church and on Sunday in some visible way every week. were go, go, go. Yes, yes, yes. And I think if I look back on it and really ponder deep down, think it was, we wanted to be important. And we did want to build something. We wanted to build a future for us and our family, but it was definitely like a different future, I think, than we have today. Wow. Yeah. We've never really talked about this before. And so that's interesting that you say that, but I definitely agree with you. think there was this like, this deep desire that we wanted to be valuable. And that's a good word. Yeah. I think that was a deep, almost like a misplaced desire of we wanted to be valuable, but we had maybe one kid or two kids at the time, but it was like, I think that you and I now today, we see ourselves as being on like, we don't need any attention or we don't need to get credit for anything. Like we truly, I think see our child rearing and child raising as that is where our value is, is like pouring into the legacy, which is our children. But I think back then, I think we wanted to be the ones that gave the value and that to be seen or to be acknowledged or to be like, we're worthy of working for the kingdom of God. That's such a good way to put it. And when you think about that, What fruit did you see in that season when that was what we were chasing? I think that probably the fruit was busy, crazy, exhausted and I know our hearts were good. We wanted to serve God. Like there's no doubt about that. We wanted to serve the Lord. We wanted to contribute to the body of Christ, but selfishly, I think we also wanted to be seen as contributors. And I think that drove us to doing more than our capacity allowed. And so it led to exhaustion. It led to, you know, a marriage that was hungry and thirsty for connection. It led to probably... Not even meeting the deepest desire of our heart It like we are like meeting it in a world way of let's just do all the things this is before we Determined what our family roots were or discovered our family roots. We weren't really clear on what we were Chasing what we were like building our life upon and so I think that when you aren't clear you end up saying yes to so many things because you don't know what to say yes to. Yeah. I think what I'm realizing too, as you say all this is the fruit is even more limited than you think. Cause in that moment you're like, wow, I made a difference in this person's life or wow, this ministry I'm working in is, is really helpful. this is great. Everybody's loving the results, but your fruit is so much more limited because A, on the inside you're just crushing yourself, but then B, you're just setting this example of well, this is what good Christians do. So then you're just setting other people up to fail ultimately too. And truly we know this is in the real world out there, people like who don't know the Lord are chasing money and success and wealth and all these other things. So it's just, I think it's a good call out like, we can be working quote unquote for the Lord, but we can be doing it in actually semi-destructive ways. Yeah. Even though it feels like it's fruitful at times. holy. Or holy. That's so good. Yeah, that's good. So I think what we're realizing too is that before you choose your roots, you don't really have a filter, which really brings us to point number two. today is that your family roots will become your filters. That you really bring all of life's circumstances, your life's questions, your decision making, you bring all of that through your roots. Because when your roots are clear, your decisions become clearer. And so for example, maybe we could share about our story and how we chose to move to Colorado and how our roots played into that. Do you remember how we sat down at the coffee shop when we were visiting Pagosa Springs for the first time and we were praying about moving here? And I remember you and I sitting down and asking each other, okay, let's bring this right back to our roots. Would moving to Pagosa Springs, Colorado be in line with our family roots? I remember you and I walked through each of our routes. We'll share that in just a moment, what our six routes are. And we went through each route and said, okay, does this help us live out this route? Does it help us live out this route? And it was amazing how all six of our routes would not only be met by moving here, but we could actually like thrive within each of those routes by moving here. Yeah, it was a really powerful realization. Our first route is God first and in this season we really felt the pull from the Lord to make the move. For us this came about internally, we didn't want to do it, but in our heart and in our prayers we knew that God was telling us it was still the right thing to do. And so, I mean there was just a simple act of like Okay, we need to be obedient here. Our second route is family always. And when we looked at the opportunities this move would present us, the activities we would have, the lifestyle, we were just really excited about what it would unlock for our family. I know it sounds so silly, but like this is a really small town. We were going to get hours, literally multiple hours back in our week in family time, just not driving in the car all the time, like to and from school, which was like a half hour away. And we couldn't afford to move closer to the school. we like, we're going to continue to do that forever. and you know, activities and all the things like Asheville, North Carolina is just a bigger town with mountains in the middle and you got to drive. I mean, our joke was it was 20 minutes to everything. Yeah. It didn't even matter where you lived, where you were. It took 20 minutes to get somewhere. Well, and you think like 20 minutes isn't that big of a deal. But like we're talking, we live in like small town Colorado where we literally can get to the grocery store in one minute. We can get to church in one minute. We can get to school in three minutes. Like everything is essentially two to three minutes away. So if you compare that, I mean, that's significant time back in our pockets. Yeah, to which we really do spend more time together. We cook more together because we have more time. We go on more walks. We go fishing at the lake nearby. Like, we just have more time for these things. Adventure, we have a root of adventure. We love to go hiking. We love to explore, travel, take new things together. just being out West and again, everything is closer. So it really has created more of those adventures for us Another route is that we are forever learners and this move to a totally different climate, different elevation, different culture. has really challenged us in a lot of different ways that are good for us. Like it's good for us to understand different cultures. It's good for us to learn what it means to live at a high desert versus low plains. It's good to be out in the West and see the vastness and learn more about God's beauty in a completely different way than. we can see here that we just didn't get to see other places. And to piggyback off that, you and I were really excited about learning some new hobbies that we didn't have. Like it wasn't as accessible back where we were. You're right. And so I think about you and I have dreamed about for so long having our kids grow up on a ski hill. And, you know, Pagosa Springs is a ski town and our kids get to ski literally all winter long. and they get to ski at a very young age. Like we just took our two year old, she was two at the time, just this past winter out on the ski hill, the mountain for the first time. And that was a true dream come true for me to be able to teach our kids to learn to ski at a young age and to grow up doing that. But I think about all the other opportunities that we have been able to learn and we will get to learn just by living in the Colorado mountains. Yeah, you're you're absolutely right. And another root of ours is to serve. we have always served through church or the other places we've been. So I think we knew we would always fall into that. But something that's allowing us to serve is Legacy Roots Co. and this podcast. And the beauty of it is we can take and go anywhere. And so we knew we could easily continue this route while we wait and discovered what God would have for us here in Pagosa Springs. I I think that really leads us to the last route. our sixth route is inspire. We seek to always inspire other people and be inspired ourselves. And we knew that our work with Legacy Roots Co., a lot of it comes out of a place of being inspired. And when we were in Pagosa visiting, were, I mean, so inspired by these mountains, this glorious nature that is surrounding this town. And so, By being here in Pagosa full time, it really felt like a place where we could stay inspired so that we could inspire other people. And I would say that's been 100 % true. Can I ask you something? When was the last time you actually felt at peace? Not just productive, not just caught up, but settled. Because most of us aren't lacking desire for a slower, deeper life. We're just stuck in the busyness that keeps us rushing right past it. That's why we created the Slow and Saber Society. It's a snail mail club. Yes, it comes straight to your mailbox. It's a simple, tangible way to slow down each month. A piece of art, a cozy recipe, and a letter designed to help you reconnect with what actually matters. With God, with your family, and with your own soul. If your life has felt full but not meaningful, this is your invitation to begin again. You can learn more or join us at legacyrootsco.com/slash mailclub. And right now, if you use code podcast, you'll get 50% off your first month so you can try it out. Now back to the episode. So Kayla, when you think back, what if we had made that decision based purely on comfort or what we would have thought we wanted? Because remember I said we didn't exactly want to make this cross country move at the time. So like instead of making the decision based on our roots, if we would have just made the decision based on what we thought would have been the... the right idea. Yeah, the easy thing. Yeah. At times. Yeah. And maybe and maybe that is the answer. Maybe it's like we would have made a decision purely off of, you know, what we want or don't want or what's comfortable or what's not comfortable. And I think what we did is we we took the decision to another level. of course, we are going to pray about it. And there are probably many listening to this podcast that are praying over their decisions. But sometimes when we're praying about decisions and we're not really getting clarity yet on the direction of where to go, knowing your roots really does give you more direction. And I think that's what it did for us. And you and I could have very easily almost said, okay, this wasn't the right choice for our family. if we had gone through this exercise of does this fit into our roots? We could have said, you know what, this is a very clear no for us. let's say none of these roots could have been achieved or lived out with this decision, we would have known, yeah, we can't move to Colorado. Like, this is just not who we are. It's not in line with who we are. And, you know, this wouldn't have been a flippant no. because we have spent so much time thinking about what our roots are and really solidifying our roots years before this decision. And we're so blessed now looking on the other side of the decision, having made it through our roots, because if you listen to our roots, owning your home, like forever for instance, doesn't necessarily like fit into our roots. Having our kids into a really amazing prestigious school is not in our roots. But those were the reasons we kind of wanted to stay in North Carolina. And they were like, they're like surface level if you will to us in our family roots. I wanted to stay because truly looking back, I'm like, we finally have a home. and we have our kids in this amazing school, like we're not gonna find another school as awesome as this. And looking back to that and then looking now, I'm like, well, you know, I'm so glad we didn't make a decision based on those things. I'm so happy we made the decision based on our roots. And, there's been so many blessings on the other side. Of all of this, and obviously we've talked many times about like Darla and the miracle of her story. If she had all these issues in North Carolina, she just wouldn't have had the same level of care available to her. And so part of her story is directly tied to us following our family roots. then this unexpected blessing the Lord brought in. all of that circumstance. Yeah, and speaking of Darla, you know, we walked through a very, very difficult year. And you can go back to the last few episodes where we talked about her story in episodes 22 and 23. But why do you think our roots became even more important during a hard season like being in the hospital for 140 days? multiple surgeries with our baby? Like, how do you think that we leaned into our roots in a hard season like that? I really love that question. I guess I haven't thought exactly about this, so I'm really glad we're talking about it because I think about the fact that we put God first. We really trusted in him and we we rooted our children to also be trusting in him through all of that process, no matter what was going on. Yeah. I think about our family first. we had to make some really hard decisions. it was hard for me to leave Pagosa as much and as often as I ended up leaving for, especially around her birth for how long it was and try to hang on to working and all these other things to keep our family moving. that was really, really difficult. And if I didn't put family first, through that, like I could have said, work comes first. And I would have been there for you less. I would have been there for our children less probably if that was my filter. And you know, I don't regret a moment of putting our family first. And you had to do that. We all had to do that. Actually all of our children had to take moments where they had to give up certain things, be away from school more, whatever. the decision was, but it was around our family being there first. Well, I think about, like our, one of our roots is God first and then we have family always. And like what you're getting at is like, we always were prioritizing the family. And I think about how with the kids, we were constantly thinking about the other six kids through this entire situation. I made multiple trips back to Pagosa Springs to see the kids during Darla's 140 days in the hospital. And we were continuously making decisions to give the other kids some normalcy, but also like joyful moments through a difficult season. I remember, I think it was four weeks postpartum and I came back to Pagosa. It was so hard leaving Darla and the NICU to come back. but we did a family ski day to just give the kids a moment of joy. And then even we prioritized the kids' during that season, like really making sure each kid who had a birthday during that season felt celebrated, felt seen. And you're right, we made space for adventure, one of our roots too. We did the ski day, we came to see you last year and we went boating and that became a new tradition for us is to go out on the lake and go boating. We went hiking and this is all while Darla's still in the NICU. We were prioritizing adventure and exploring because that brings us joy as a family. And we served each other. I mean, it wasn't a season where we were gonna say yes to serving really outside of our home because we just didn't, we couldn't. We didn't have the time or the energy or the capacity, but we did need to serve each other. And I think we continued to look for inspiration and we continued in our quiet time and allowed the Lord to inspire us and continue us. And I mean, look at you, you have this amazing, painting opportunity now and business that you're using to bless so many people. And you were living out that route of being inspired in that timeframe. Yeah, that's such a good point. I actually just reflecting on such a celebratory moment that we had with our family a couple of days ago. And we had four out of our seven kids choose to be baptized this last Sunday. and it was the most special day. It's like truly the day that you, I think, pray about and visualize for the moment that your kid is born as a Christian parent, not the baptism itself, but like your kid professing faith in Jesus Christ. And we're almost exactly a year since the NICU and you had just stated how we as a family really put God first through that entire season. But I feel like our kids, our four oldest kids professing faith in Christ that they want to live for him the rest of their days a year later after the storm, I think is such a testament to our family making God our rock during that season. And I think it's so miraculous and beautiful that our kids would then stand in front of the church a few days ago and share the story of how God drew them closer to him in one of the hardest times of their entire lives thus far. Yeah, that's really beautifully said. You know, really this brings us to point three, that roots create your rhythms. Once you've discovered your roots, you need to start living your life in alignment to them and seeing where they're not. And so for us, like I said before, God first, like we were not practicing the Sabbath. We were not taking this intentional time to root our entire family in the Lord the way that we wanted to. And I think we have only grown in our daily quiet time with the Lord. it's always been a part of our daily rhythms, but I see us now even being more intentional. We've even adjusted our bedtime routine rhythms so that we can have significant time with the Lord in the mornings. it's almost impacted other rhythms of our life. Sabbath isn't just like, we take a day off of work. We literally plan our entire week now around the Sabbath so that we can spend a whole day not working, being in God's presence, enjoying Him. I think about all the ways that we get to worship God and honor Him in our life and to get closer to Him. It's like... we've designed our life with specific rhythms in mind not to earn more of God or like earn a better relationship with him. It's truly because we love him so much, we are like, how can we spend more time with him? how can we prioritize him even more in our life? And rhythms are really the key to that because a rhythm really says, this thing that I'm spending time on consistently is important to me. A rhythm is something that happens consistently over and over and over again. And when we make an official rhythm around something, it really does declare to ourselves and to the people around us that this thing is a priority. Wow. I think that is so beautifully said. Thank you for sharing that. that makes me think of when we talk about family always, we always gather around the dinner table. We just don't skip that. In fact, we've expanded that to family breakfast and you know, we even eat lunch now that I'm home more throughout the work day and we absolutely love that. And so we joke about food in our family a lot and how much we love it, but food is just a way that we're brought together and we make that really, really special by by making sure we come together. we do a weekly family meeting. So every Sunday night, we start at a new rhythm where we go over our whole week with the family and really talk about, sure, our schedule, but also what's gonna be important to us throughout the week in our character? What's the thing we're gonna work on as a family? What are we aiming for? And then throughout the week, of course, people... You know, if it's kindness that week, people, the kids tend to be unkind, right? So then we go back to, hey, we are all working on this together and we need to, we're getting an alignment on that. That's good. What other rhythms do you think of that fit our roots? Well, so just to clarify, these roots are close to our heart, but you are new to hearing what our roots are. I just wanna say them one more time. So our six roots for our family are God first, family always, adventure, forever learners, serve and inspire. And those six roots are something like we've just been saying, we have intentionally built some rhythms around so that we can actually live these roots out. It's nice to have them on your wall. we actually have our roots on our dining room wall that we look at literally every single day. We refer to them often. but there's another whole thing to actually living these things out. Like we don't want them to just be pretty words on our wall. We want them to be something that these are the things we really care about as a family. This is who God made our family to be. So how can we actually like thrive in these roots? And. This is where rhythms gets really fun and practical and practical. Yeah, because it's not just like, I need to have a bedtime routine. I need to have a meal planning routine or rhythm you are making intentional rhythms based on your roots. Now, granted, we have to have some things like a laundry rhythm. You probably don't have washing your laundry as a family route. But you might have the root of steadiness or you might have the root of peace. And some of these roots would lead you to wanting a really good laundry rhythm. Because you know that if you don't have a good laundry rhythm, you're going to have chaos in your home every week. Or like, there's not going to be peace or steadiness. let's stick with that as an example. That's a great example because we have a laundry rhythm. We wash like all of our stuff on Wednesdays and we fold it all on Thursday. And that's like, yeah, well, how does that fit in? Well, it actually does because we want God to be first in our life. And so we want to practice the Sabbath. So we need a laundry rhythm to make sure that really critical thing happens at a time of the week. That's that it's not going to fall in the Sabbath. definitely thought you were going to say that we need this rhythm because God wants us to have clean laundry so we can be clean. Be a loathe commandment. I guarantee you all this other stuff would happen throughout the week and we get to the weekend and we're like crap. We have to do our laundry. I guess we can't go hiking today. I guess we don't have time to go fishing today. Like we wouldn't have the time and space because something like laundry would always get pushed to the wayside in our life until it absolutely had to be done. And then we'd have to say no to things we don't want to say no to. Totally. Yeah. So I hope that you're starting to see how we practically live out our roots. This episode definitely is not going to get into the nitty gritty of that. That's actually why we developed a whole course around this called home M.O. that we launch at least once a year. And so we We love walking our students through how to discover your roots. We want to encourage you to start thinking about this and talking about this, on your own, but definitely keep your eyes peeled for Home MO when we launch that next. Look out for Discover Your Roots, which is a very simple, easy course that you can do with your spouse to learn how to discover your roots. But this is something that you don't even need our course for. or our class workshops for, you can simply begin the conversation today you might start to ask yourself the question, what might be our family roots? And even to get simpler than that, I think it's really starting to think about like, what does your family care about? And really starting to, Maybe even talk to your children about it, talk to your spouse about it. But this really comes down to beginning the conversation and really starting to understand who has God made your family to be? And I think the beauty of this concept and something that it gets a little bit lost or people start thinking, I need to like go away and go on a vision quest. I need to rediscover myself. Uh huh. I'm lost. Like you're not like you live your life. Uh huh. I think this needs to happen in the regular part of your life in your home because that's reality. Yeah. Like there's so many things that you see nowadays that are like, Oh, I need to go find myself. I need to go to blah, No, like you are where God wants you to be. right now. You are surrounded by your family, the people that God has placed in your life. You are doing the work that he currently has for you. so you will discover, you will find exactly who he wants you to be in that. look to where you are, look to reality, pray. that God will walk through this with you as you search for him intentionally. I just encourage that, because there's a lot of stuff out there. You hear all these stories of people kind of going to these weird extreme lengths to quote unquote find themselves. And we're not talking about some spiritual theory. We're talking about living in reality with God and who he made you to be. And more often than not, we're just living unintentionally. So we haven't even put energy into that. And the beautiful thing is, our encouragement to you today is you can intentionally begin to focus on these things and see the Lord do something amazing in your life and in your actual reality. Yeah, but I love how you said that, like just living in reality. And I think part of that comes down to just looking at the reality of your current schedule. Your schedule, just like how we opened up this episode, your schedule will reveal so much about you. It will reveal where you are literally spending your time. this is not a made up, like, I wonder how I could spend my time or where I could spend my time. Like, where are you currently spending your time? Part of that will be a revealing of your roots, because you might be a family who goes to the gym all the time, and you may... thoroughly enjoy that and so maybe health or fitness is a route for your family and you guys love spending time on nutrition and health and all those things and so I just say all that to say your schedule is the reality. It is actually how you're spending your time right now. You can decide from this conversation if you want to continue spending your time that way or if there are some tweaks you want to make. But I think the first action step to this whole conversation that we really wanna encourage you to make this week is to just begin the conversation about your family values or roots, however you wanna call them. We call them roots. But sit down after the kids go to bed with your spouse or maybe over a cup of coffee early in the morning if you're like us who love early morning conversations and just ask the question, when are kids are adults? What do we hope they say our family was all about? So I'm gonna say that one more time. When our kids are adults, what do we hope that they say our family was all about? And maybe who or what do we want to become as a family? Those are, think, two questions that are very revealing. I think that first question about like, what do you want your kids to say about your family? I think that might even be emotional for you if you really get serious about asking that question. I know for us, we have asked that question several times and it does make us emotional thinking about our kids being grown and reflecting on their childhood and reflecting on how we were as a family and what we were about. But really it's like just beginning the conversation. is key to discovering your roots. Yeah, and as you gain that clarity, the next part will become more clear. Whatever next steps you think you should take and the beautiful thing is you will be aligned on those decisions. And so if you don't have these conversations, you can't actually make these changes. And so that is a beautiful gift that will come from those conversations. So. We hope that this episode really just started the thought process for you. This is definitely not an all-encompassing episode and be on the lookout because we're going to definitely have a lot more episodes on this topic of roots and family values, family mission statement, all the things. And we hope that it will guide you in building a deeply rooted family, the family that you have always longed for, a family that is unshakable in any life storm. And a family that really does develop and grow generations that you are so proud of and a legacy that really points people back to God. Yeah, we really believe one of the greatest gifts you can give your children isn't a perfect schedule, it's not a perfect house, it isn't a perfect childhood, it's a family that is deeply rooted in Christ. Because roots don't just help a tree grow, they help it stand. Storms will come, busy seasons will come, unexpected suffering will happen, opportunities will come your way. But when your roots are deep, you don't have to wonder who you are. You already know. And it's from that place you can build rhythms, make decisions, and leave a legacy that lasts for generations. So remember, before you decide what your family does, Decide who your family is becoming in Christ. Thanks for being here today on the Rooted Family Podcast and we look forward to seeing you next week.