Our Family Benediction

Liz: Ben and I have an almost-three-year-old. It's been a really fun season where we're moving out of the super baby toddler phase and into a phase where our son is really cognitively engaged and asking really good questions and remembering things. For the last few months, we've been entering into the season of trying to translate what we believe about him, about God, about other people into terms that a three-year-old can understand. 

And it's been a really beautiful process. I've found it one of the most beneficial spiritual disciplines that I've experienced since I've been a Christian. How do you translate what you know to be true to something a three-year-old can understand? 

There's something amazing about stripping down and getting to the core essence of what we believe. We've been working on that as a family for the last month or so. We just wrote a family benediction that says what the Bohannan family believes. We recite it whether it's on our way to school or before we go to bed at night. It's going back to Scripture, then thinking about what Scriptures are going to guide us. 

That said, the first line of our benediction is based on Isaiah 51:7, which the Message version says, "Listen now, you who know right from wrong, you who hold my teaching inside you, pay no attention to insults. . . . don't let it get you down."

In that first line of our family benediction, it's not what I have, what I do, or what people say. It's this: I'm a child of God. And no one can take that away. We teach this to our three-year-old, and he says it now, and it's amazing! But I find that it's starting to work its way into my own mind. 

As an entrepreneur, I've found it incredibly grounding and very beneficial to me to walk into work each day and say, "I'm not what I do. I'm not what I have. I'm not what other people say. I’m grounding myself in this belief that I am beloved and that I'm created in the divine image of my Creator who created me to create." And so I can kind of get out of my ego and insecurity and into doing the work that I was meant to do, whether that's at Sseko, in our family, or in our marriage.

Ben: The clearest thing for Liz and me is really what bleeds into work. There's a book called Every Moment Holy. It's a book of prayers and it's a liturgy for these everyday moments. I would recommend it to anyone, and especially to people that maybe don't spend a ton of time in prayer, but just need something to walk them through their experiences, or help him enter into an experience.

Over the last few months, we've gone through a fair amount of transition on our team and in our office too in Portland. We've had people in and people out. People have transitioned out and we've had to let people go. 

But amidst all of that, there's specifically a prayer that we've used. It's like a prayer for companies—a prayer for those who employ people. It's impacted us a lot to be able to read the words of the prayer. What does it mean? How cool is it that we get to steward these resources and the words given us, and that we get to steward somebody's time? How cool is it that they're with us, and we're impacting their life in the time that they're within these four walls?

Liz and I have been commuting to work together, which is another plus of working together as a married couple. We've been able to read through these prayers and think about how we're essentially praying over our day and our employees so that we're ready to walk in and deliver really hard news or deliver good news some days.

It's encouraging to know that we're going into it with the spirit of being faithful to what the Lord has given us, and we're going to honor the time that our employees have given us and the work they've put in. But we also know that sometimes it doesn't turn out exactly as everyone wants it to turn out. That's a really challenging thing that we have to wrestle through as believers as we're running these businesses. 

But it's been so comforting to have words to pray through as we go in and prepare for those moments.

Ben and Liz Bohannon

Liz Bohannon is a speaker, an entrepreneur, and along with her husband, Ben, is the co-founder of Sseko Designs, an international purpose-driven fashion brand creating employment for women across the globe. 

--

If you enjoyed this reading plan, explore other resources for Faith Driven Entrepreneurs