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Five Building Materials for a Healthy Household

There is nothing more rewarding than building a strong household.  Having my wife and kids around me for the holidays has been great this year. For the first time I’ve been able to spend a lot of time with them WITHOUT feeling a nagging sense of guilt for not working or unfinished business.

A household is a place to lay our heads, to feel safe, to feel warm and protected. Building a household is a fundamental human drive.  Building a good household I think is one of the primary responsibilities of parenting.  Whether that place is large or small, beautiful or ugly, a place to call home is needed and wanted by almost everyone.

Knowing how to build a healthy household does not necessarily come natural to most of us, especially men.  I am constantly learning from men who have done it well, from scripture and from experience at home. I have learned that anyone can build a healthy household with the following five essential building materials.  

  1. “Concrete Footers” of love – husbands love your wife and do not be harsh with them.  I think that God knew that a common struggle for men would be with harshness toward his family.  For the man able to overcome this struggle and love his family with Gods help, a fruitful family life will emerge.
  2. “Walls” of faith in God – walls protect a household from the elements, from thieves that would steal. Faith in God provides the protection needed to thrive and to survive.  The truth is our very lives depend on God and his protection because of the fact that there is evil, loss and death in this world.  Access to God and his blessings is by faith, it’s just how things are right now.
  3. The “Roof” of financial management – if we can’t or wont manage well the finances of the home, be it a large or small home, a large or small income, we simply can not live where we want to live.
  4. The “Heating System” of slow to anger  – James 1:20 says “the anger of man does not bring about the righteousness of God”.  Slowness to anger and “soft answers which turn away wrath” are essential, we simply can not do family without them.  Anger brings a destructive chill which unsettles the home, the family and it leads to many other destructive forces.
  5. The “Plumbing System” of forgiveness – daily forgiveness removes the waste of resentment, the waste’s of wrath and retaliation that don’t belong at home.   Without the removal of these toxins the household will become a septic system of resentment, anger and hate and will eventually break apart.
Cottage At Dornie

Cottage At Dornie

Buildings are made with concrete, wood, shingles, furnaces and pipes but healthy households are built with love, faith in God, financial sanity, slowness to anger and forgiveness.

Are there any building elements missing from your household?

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Goal-Setting: Our Path to Productivity in 2015

 

In mid-December I took a half-day to do two things.

  1. Evaluate 2014 life-goals and how I performed at meeting them.
  2. Set new life-goals for 2015.

Life-goals are important, they give us a path to travel on to get to where we want to be, they remind us of important things we may otherwise forget when life gets chaotic and they help us to focus on the most important things.

The way that I do life goals is a little intense, I developed this process by tweaking Michael Hyatt’s process.  I break up my life into categories, then in each category I evaluate where I am, where I want to be, then I set specific goals accordingly.  For example, I have my life broken up into the following seven categories.

  1. Relationship with God
  2. Taking care of Self (health, growth, rest)
  3. Relationship with my spouse
  4. Parenting/ Relationship with Children
  5. My ministry (outside of family)
  6. My Career
  7. Our Finances

Within each category I have a current reality, the desired results and specific goals, the goals I set are realistic (obtainable with effort), they are specific and they are not necessarily simple to accomplish.

In 2014 I met 62.5% of my 24 goals, the majority of those not met were financial, this was a struggle for us in 2014.

In 2015 I thought it was important to reduce my number of total goals, I am doing this by limiting each category to 3 or less goals, so in 2015 I have 21 specific goals.

I print these out and I regularly glance at them for reminders throughout the year.

Having life-goals improves productivity plus it is exciting to know when progress is made towards a more fruitful and satisfying life.

If you need help setting goals, leave a comment below or email me at collierak@me.com

Have you set your goals for 2015? What process do you use, if any, for goal setting?

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Rights, Giftings & Blog Plans for 2015

 

We should be able to agree that all people have inalienable natural rights, rights we do not tolerate being stripped away by other people. Of this most Americans and many people’s around the world will agree to and would even give their lives to defend. As you know these rights include:

  • Life
  • Liberty
  • Pursuit of Happiness

Standing on the foundation of these rights are what I call inalienable gifts, these gifts are human activities that emerge from people when their natural rights are defended.  These gifts emerge from us naturally when our rights are ensured and defended, these gifts are built into our DNA and they include:

  • The ability and drive to create, to invent and to provide value.
  • The ability and drive to build community and family.

Creativity, as I’ve written about extensively in the past is a powerful force in this world and has been the primary topic of this blog.

In 2015 I would like move to the next primary topic of this blog which is ‘building and managing of households’.  Creativity will always be an important theme for this site but I want to also write about managing the family.  The fellowship that comes and is enjoyed by people among family or friendship groups is foundational to a civilized society.  There are households of families, there are households of faith and I believe that family gets to the core of why we are on this planet.

I’m not necessarily adding this topic because I am an expert on this topic but because this is where I am in life.  You may know that I am married with 5 young children, and am a member of a church. These two families are a huge part of my life.  As part of my new years goals for 2015 I am attempting to better align my blogging with my family life and create products accordingly.  I also plan to share my faith much more so on this site. Topics that I plan to write about and hopefully create products include: Household management, parenting from a dad’s perspective, children’s training and education (particularly science), healthy marriage from a husband’s perspective, family budgeting and healthy church.

Some of you began following this blog when I was writing about innovation and science, where this blog is headed I think is considerably different from this topic.  I may still write about this periodically but I understand if you un-follow, no hard feelings. This blog has been a several year-long journey of tweaks and adjustments and I have enjoyed every moment of it.

Any feedback? Are there particular family or church topics that you would like to see discussed?

PS: My home computer is down which means I can not edit podcast episodes, unfortunately until my computer is replaced podcasting for this site is on hold.

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