These Are Our Hall Ways

If I posted all the started posts I write, there would be a lot more on here more often, but it would all be a lot more incomplete and unpolished (maybe no one would notice the difference??).  Maybe I should publish one once in a while just to throw people off, or challenge the world to finish my randomness for me.

We have a family mission statement.  It is about two months old now, and it took us almost a year to write (I blame myself).  Our writing process went something like this:

• One family home evening we talked about what a mission statement is, and told everyone to start thinking about things that make our family different than other families so we could jot those down in a week or two.
• A few months later, we talked about it again, and said, "Hey, remember when we talked about having a mission statement?  Now let's write down some ideas."  We passed out note cards and had everyone write down at least five ideas on how our family is different from other families, or the kinds of things that are important to our family.  When it was over, we read them through, I gathered them up, and put them in my scripture bag.
• A few months later, we pulled them out again, looked them all over as a family, grouped similar suggestions, and talked about ways we could reword some things to include other things as well.  When we were done, they all went back into my scripture bag for further fermenting.
• A few months later, I pulled them all out again and typed up the ideas.  Over the next few days I looked at it and stewed over it, changed the order of a few things, adjusted wording here and there, then e-mailed it off to Jamie for his thoughts.  He gave some suggestions, and I incorporated those in.  A bit more minor tweaking, and voila, it was finished and ready for the rest of the family.

As you can see, the process could have been a lot quicker, but maybe we needed that time to come up with some of the best parts.  It really was a family effort.  When it was complete and I read it to the kids, we pulled out the cards and talked about where each of their ideas worked in.  They were all pleased.  Except for one thing, which I will mention at the end.  But here it is.

We are the Hall Family

and these are our Hall Ways.

The Halls are great people! (That is always said with vigor.)

As family members and friends, we love each other and serve each other.

We love spending time together, both playing and working.

We love to learn great things.

We can do hard things and we do the right things.

Miracles happen when we're working together.

We focus on Christ, study the scriptures, and follow the prophet.

The temple is our goal.

Together, we are the happiest family.

We recite this every morning now before scripture study.  Everyone memorized it really quickly.  About two days into it, Sammy told me we're bragging there at the end.  I told him it's not bragging, because every family, when they are together, can be the happiest family.  I mentioned what he said to a friend who also has a family mission statement, and she said, "He should hear ours then!"  Part of theirs mentions that among a variety of other wonderful things, they are "gooooood lookin!"

At least once a week someone mentions something that we should add to it, whether it's something funny like, "We love our baby!" or a portion of a scripture that we feel would apply well.  I don't think there will be any changes at this point, but maybe somewhere down the road we'll look at that.