We were so excited to be able to see General Conference this weekend! We spent Saturday watching from our house and we went with my sisters Sunday morning to watch the morning session, then spent the day together watching the afternoon session and eating taco soup and fudge :)
Stuart and I have, for the time we have been married, been working on several goals and have tried to consistently plan so that we could stay organized and continue growing. We have a system down where we have individual and companionship planned on a weekly basis where we can check ourselves off (Stuart tracks our progress every week and so far the best we have ever done is 88%). We keep these on a white board hanging in our bedroom so that we can see them and see our progress every day. Then we have a smaller erase board where every night we have a quick planning meeting to see what our schedule is like for the next day and make sure there is time allotted for us to actually do our goals. (I also use this board to make shopping lists, keep a to-do list, and keep a permanent list of daily chores so we know what the goal "clean up" means to BOTH of us :) Well in the process of trying to stick with these goals, we have come to realize that we really needed to have a larger mission statement to dictate those goals because if the goal wasn't connected to a deeper vision then we are not very motivated to actually DOING the goal. (You know when you do really great until Thursday and then suddenly life is too busy to stick to what you planned! I honestly believe that is why we are advised to do FHE on Monday!) Anyhow to help us get a better vision of what we wanted our family to look like and help direct our goals to be more meaningful we created a family mission statement!
We the Larsen Family will Prepare for the Eternities by: Creating a Zion Family Eliminate Criticism
Build family ties through appropriate Recreation
Hold regular Family Councils and Personal Interviews
Cultivating a Christ-centered Home Regularly study God's word and the life of the Savior
Safeguard against the world by allowing only things that keep the Spirit
Pray Always
Building Lives of Service Find meaning and joy in work
Strive to know our neighbors and discern their needs by forming friendships
Understand that true happiness comes from putting others before ourselves
Provident Living Live within our means
Sacrifice personal wants for the needs of the family
Store up spiritual and temporal reserves for times of scarcity
We were so excited to do this for Family Home Evening and realize that conference had given us so many good ideas of how we can base our goals around these things, like for example we are now so much more excited to do scripture study together because we got the idea from one of the talks to share our testimony at the end of our study. We also feel so much comfort to be able to listen to people speak as authorities on such important topics and we have the luxury of completely believing them without having to use critical analysis to figure out what really is true, because these people are prophets and called of God to share his word! What a blessing. And after going to school everyday and having to question and analyze to separate opinion from reality what a relief! We will be studying the talks and hopefully that will get us past our Thursday goal slumps!
