Our Payleitner Family Creed
We’ve got a small, unassuming, framed sheet of paper hanging in our dining room. It never fails to attract attention and questions from guests.
The audience, however, is ourselves—my family. It’s for us. Every day.
When we became parents, my wife and I decided that we had to actually decide what it would mean for us to be parents… Or else it would just happen to us. We certainly weren’t and aren’t experts. We read our Bibles, we talked to each other, and we learned from our shared (yet limited) experiences… The result was this. It hangs on our wall and we talk about it with our children (and ourselves) all the time:
I know this is far afield from the normal types of things I post here. But I’ve been asked about it enough—and it was something I wrote a few years back—so I thought it might be of interest to some. That last point is one of my favorite things I’ve ever written… I didn’t really understand its full implications when I first wrote it down, but that is what we do and it makes everything better. It’s also a decision-making grid that results in more books, board games, art projects, baseball, woodworking, farm visiting, family walks, storytelling, meaningful conversations, and laughter. I highly recommend it.