I have teamed up with a wonderful team of bloggers who participate in “Five Minute Friday.” Here’s the skinny: Every Friday for nearly four years hundreds of people joined a kind of writing flash mob. We write for five minutes flat. All on the same prompt that is posted by the the team starting at 10pm EST on Thursday night and all through Friday. And we connect on Twitter with the hashtag #FMFParty (It stands for Five Minute Friday Party). No extreme editing; no worrying about perfect grammar, font, or punctuation. Unscripted. Unedited. Real.
Five Minute Friday word prompt:: PURPOSE
This has been a transitional year for our family, to say the least. One filled with challenge, struggle, amazing joy, peaks and valleys of emotions, and clarity. The year has had a central focus of finding our purpose. How can we best raise our three young children with the character qualities that we want them to have? How can we slow down the pace of our active lives to find calm amongst the chaos? How can we see our blessings when they are all too often clouded by the trenches of struggle that come with having young children? How can we find our family’s purpose?
We have decided to put selfless and brave decisions for our family in front of career goals and self-driven success. There are days – many days in fact – that I struggle to know if this was the right choice. Then, between the yelling and the sibling rivalry and the rush rush of our week, I notice a kind word spoken to a sibling, I notice a thoughtful act on a stranger, I notice a sweet hug for no reason. In those moments, I can see that the purpose of our family is stronger than the purpose of our separate lives.
The purpose of human life is to serve, and to show compassion and the will to help others. – Albert Schweitzer
