What Family Mission We Have in Our Home
Video Transcription
It is a rainy Wednesday here. I hope you guys are all inside. Just enjoying the rain and how it is watering all our plants. I know our garden is loving it as well. Excited to once again come with you during the midday and I brewed up some tea today. I have been drinking, whenever it's rainy, this Richmond fog tea. I got it from a friend while visiting Virginia. I highly recommend this tea. It has a little cinnamon flavor to it. Perfect for a rainy day. So, we're just going to get started here as people start to log on. I want to give time for that but how are you? Did you have time to make Mission Mind Maps and dive in and research different missions that you could support? I hope you guys all had a chance to do that and if you didn't, then, you're making time this weekend to maybe dive a little bit further and figuring out a mission that your family can come around and support.
Today, we will take a look at the missions we bring into our home. It'll be a quick video today. I know yesterday's was pretty long. So, we'll make this one nice, short, and sweet. So I can get back to my tea before it's cold. My girls always laugh at me because all the time I usually get to my coffee or tea and it is normally cold.
So, we're going to dive in into what missions we have in our family.
I wanted to start by saying, not every room in your house needs to have a mission, we talked about this yesterday as well. Your home starts to get cluttered with all these different missions and your mind's not sure where to focus your bigger purpose on. So, really hone in on choosing one mission that you can support as a family and you may have a couple here or there for different rooms in your house. Maybe you have one that's personal to you and you have it in one of your spaces whether it's your office or in a master bath or a master bedroom and maybe one of your kids has a mission that they love and you bring it to their bedroom. That is completely fine. I just want to make sure that we're not trying to find all these different missions for different rooms in our home that we're really focusing on one that we can support.
When you find that mission that you want make sure there's action behind it because right, when you're bringing the mission to your home, you're being reminded of it. You're connecting with it but it can still turn into this really cool design element that you get to talk about the mission but you're not really involved much in it. So, if you do pick a mission for your family, I urge you, if you don't have time to volunteer, which is a little bit of our situation, being a busy season and that is okay, that when you make that donation, do it manually and then, also, while you're there, take a look. What is the vision of the mission for the next year, the next five-year vision for that nonprofit pain points or maybe or struggles they are having in today's society so that you really feel connected on a monthly or quarterly basis with that design element, that mission that you're bringing into your space. That connection, that bond will happen even stronger. So, not only bring in mission to your home but really take action with it as being your bigger purpose. Thinking outside yourself and really help things of this world and others.
So, with that, we're going to dive into some of the things that we have in our home. Our main one right now, in different seasons of our life it can change, but our main one right now is the Bible Project. As I've mentioned before, this is what we have centered in our living room. It is a non-profit that really makes the Bible easy to consume if you will. They make it easy to read and that was really important to us because I know I'll get stuck reading the Bible and I don't quite understand it and so I miss bigger points or bigger lessons that we can take. Also knowing that we have little kids, it's really fun when they can open up that book and start to understand the Bible rather than having to open up their Bible and being confused by all the words. They do have their own Bibles that they read at night. There's a lot of words and sometimes they miss the point which is fine, they're little still but having this book in the center our living room, the center of our home is really important to us. Then we also use it for our life group. We've dove in a couple times because they have summaries on there as well. It really helped us understand and start discussions over different books of the Bible. So, this is the mission that we have chosen for our living room and for our family to come around.
Then, we do have some personal missions as well. I love Treetop Collective in Grand Rapids where they help refugee women really thrive in our community and feel a part of it instead of an outsider. I love their products and their vision for where they want to take the business. I’m actually wearing one of their shirts right now. I don't know if you can see that but “love your neighbor”. It's just all about really accepting that we're all coming from different places and our stories aren't finished yet and we can thrive and really help welcome in specifically the refugees in and supporting them in our community. I love their vision and I am so hopeful when I can finally make space to volunteer and be a part of their little mini groups that come together. Looking forward to that but for right now, I have the shirts. I wear the shirts around a lot. I've given bags to my neighbors. To feel welcomed; I love that message. So, I share it in other ways right now. That is how we bring that mission into our home on a more personal level.
Then, my daughter, like I said yesterday, got done reading the Make A Difference book by the American Girl Doll Company and fell in love with the Wildlife Association and specifically tigers and saving the tigers. So, she made posters and hung them up but then she plans on having a picture of a tiger in her new room. Once again, a personal space, a personal mission that she wants and that is okay as long as you still have that family one you focus on. It's okay to have these little mini personal ones that you're connecting to at a deeper level, and not getting too distracted with.
Another good one to do is bring it into your kid's playroom because they may be too little to pick out a mission but mission at the younger age is so important to help them understand that the world is a bigger place out there. We, right now, are in between playrooms. So, our playroom is just in an unfinished basement. Toys everywhere, But we have always envisioned bringing something into their space to help them understand this bigger meaning and that there are kids around the world that maybe don’t have as much as they do and bringing that mission into their playroom. However, like I said, we start to get a little cluttered in bringing all these missions in. So, really focus on bringing one in first and then if there's something that personally touches you, you can bring in little things here and there to your personal spaces. Just don't get too overwhelmed with all the options out there because there are so many great ones. It's okay to focus on one because that's where you can connect on a deeper level and make a difference for that mission.
Those are some of the missions that we have and examples of how we've brought them into our home. I know once you get bit by this bug of trying to make a difference in this world, it can get so fun and you start to be more of a conscious shopper. So, other things that I do, I don't may not bring them into our home and display them and tell their missions but I really do try to buy from companies that are doing something good. They may not be nonprofits but they're doing something good in the world. For example, we have a Mudlove mug and bracelets that I love getting my word of the year on. Then for every purchase, Mudlove helps to bring water to someone that doesn't have water. There's also a store downtown Grand Rapids called Adored and this is conscious buying clothes for women. They have slow fashion, and all the products are made from women that were saved out of sex trafficking. If you're looking for different furniture getting more environmentally conscious furniture. I had the great opportunity to develop a product for Humanscale that just actually launched called the Path Chair and they use materials that are from recycled nets in the ocean. So, really focusing on what you're bringing into your home and not always having it tied to a specific mission, but having more conscious buying behaviors. Really start to take a different look at the companies you're buying from so that the products you bring in your home feel good, feel purposeful, and you'll just feel this shift in your home that brings a sense of life and breath and just a deeper purpose and meaning behind the products that you're bringing in.
Your action step today is to take your mind map, whatever mission that you've decided, and start whiteboarding, brainstorming different ways you could bring that one specific family mission into your home and where your going to put it. Are you going to put it in the living room? Are you going to put it in the kitchen? Where do you spend most of your time and where can you connect with this mission? And just start brainstorming any ideas on how you can bring this in. I look forward to hearing about those. Please share them with me. Message me on Facebook or Instagram. I'm found at both. I would love to see some of your ideas. Even take a picture of your sketch pad. I love to see the raw sketches that can come out of this. And as always, if you found this interesting, I would love for you to share it with others, so that we can all have our little piece of building a Lykke Haven in our own homes.
Tomorrow, we're going to be moving on to that third word for Lykke Haven. We have already covered intention and mission and tomorrow we're going to dive into why connection matters. There's two ways we look at it at Lykke Haven. We will look at it through process and we look at it through the lens of how can we create connection into our homes. So join me tomorrow. I look forward to just being with you guys again.
Have a great Wednesday
Lykke Haven Design is a full service, purpose-driven interior design firm serving clients in West Michigan. We work with clients from Ada, to Grand Rapids, to Holland (and the occasional out of state). Our mission is to create Intentional Interiors curated with a Meaningful Mission that Cultivate Connection. We do this through a process driven by Human-Centered Design. We would love to discuss your next project and how we can help.
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