As Cory and I wait and prepare for the next phase of our lives, we’re spending a lot of time discussing our ideal plan for parenting. While we know that we cannot fully prepare ourselves for the job, and that some things won’t be determined until we’re actually parents, we feel it’s important to think about these things ahead of time. We enjoy reading, researching, discussing, and analyzing various aspects of parenting, and deciding how we would like to do things. Throughout our discussions, we’ve started to discover a parenting vision for ourselves.

We have faith that our journey into parenthood is drawing closer now, so we decided to sit down and write a detailed “parenting vision” as a way to guide our choices and clarify our values in terms of how we’d like to raise our children. This blueprint gives us a way to organize our thoughts and begin truly preparing ourselves for the wonderful and demanding task ahead of us. At the same time, we realize that different aspects of our plan may need to be adjusted, amended, or even abandoned as we journey through parenthood. Our plan is something that will likely always be evolving and in need of further refinement. Writing down our parenting vision gives us a foundation to build on as we begin our parenting careers.

One sentence to describe our parenting ideal could be this: We want to raise our children in a way that is centered on God and guided by love, faith, respect, and wisdom. We have also found that the principles of attachment parenting mesh well with our ideals, and integrated them into our vision. Based on this, we created our plan for parenting with four different key areas in mind: putting God at the center, using attachment parenting principles, choosing an intentional lifestyle, and teaching safety and wisdom. Our parenting vision document is lengthy, but I wanted to share a summarized version of the aspects most important to us. In this post, I will focus on the first key area, putting God at the center.

Putting God at the center means that we view our parenting as a ministry, first. We believe that as parents, we will have the opportunity to raise up new members of God’s Kingdom. Our children have the potential to make huge differences in the world for God; they may grow up to be church leaders, people who help the needy, missionaries, healers, founders of world-bettering organizations, influential speakers or writers, or artists who bring more beauty into the world. They may grow up to be husbands and wives and parents to another generation; they will be friends, lovers, employees, employers, thinkers, decision-makers, and citizens. We have a huge role to play in how they turn out. Our job as parents will be to do our best to raise our children into adults who use their lives for God.

Not only is parenting a ministry, it’s a gift and a responsibility. We are entrusted with the care of impressionable, unique, and immensely valued individuals; precious children of God. When he gives us a child, it will be an amazing blessing. It will mean that he believes we have the ability to be parents worthy of the honor of caring for one of his children. What an incredible responsibility and opportunity to serve our Lord! As such, we want to do it for our God by keeping him front and center. Our parenting careers, and our children, will be dedicated to God.

There are many practical ways that we can keep our focus on God. We plan to pray for and with our children daily. We will read and teach them the Bible, and provide resources for each child’s individual spiritual growth. We will be a family involved and connected at church. Spiritual matters will be a topic we discuss openly in our daily conversations; we will answer questions, encourage curiosity, and help our children come to know God in a genuine, personal relationship through Jesus Christ. Overall, we will raise our children in an environment of love, grace, faith, and truth. We will also rely on God as our first and best source of help and success at the monumental task of raising members of the next generation. His supernatural intervention is what we ultimately rely on for the protection, provision, health, behavior, and success of our children. We can’t do it alone and we wouldn’t want to!

In my next post, I’ll share the basics of attachment parenting, and how we plan to use it in our parenting philosophy.