Last Sunday, we had Jay and Karen Nelson and their five kids over for lunch between Sunday morning fellowship meeting and gospel meeting in the evening. Our kids are all about the same age, so the grownups had a nice chance to talk while the kids were out playing after we ate. We talked about God, family, life, our kids, making a living, and everything else that comes up in those rare opportunities for talking about whatever you want as opposed to what you are trying to get done. We even had time to take a pleasant drive through a new neighborhood going up near by just to see how it was going. In talking about the challenges of paying the mortgage, raising children to fear God, and setting appropriate priorities for where we are in life, I really got to thinking about “the big picture…”
I spend a lot of time trying to figure what I should be doing to make life better for my family. The first problem with that is that I often conflate what I want with what is good for the family. The second, equally self aggrandizing problem is that I generally only consider ny own ideas. My purpose as a servant of God, husband to my wife, father to my children, member of the church, and member of the community at large should be to serve the interests of those persons rather than my own. It would be awfully good to prepare my family for participation in their community by facilitating their participation in the decision making process as opposed to making the decisions all by myself. We can make entrepreneurial efforts with regard to starting a family business, but also in our direction as a family, participation with the church, and participation with the community at large.
I found on Amazon that lists five steps in the entrepreneurial process. The book, by Robert A. Baron and Scott A. Shane, is titled Entrepreneurship : A Process Perspective. The five steps in their process are:
With all that in mind, I am going to talk things over with my family and see how maybe we can apply those steps to things we might want to accomplish as a family. We can make it part of our homeschool program. Even taking that first step to identify the things we deem as worthy of effort will move us in a direction we might hot have considered before or establish some reasons to continue what we are doing now.