How many ideas does it take to make a great life?

Since we’re all born without the concepts necessary to succeed in life, we accumulate them along the way. By default, we use our parents’ life skills, unless we gather our own and replace their ideas with ones that are more suitable to our situation, ones that are intentional additions to our way of thinking and behaving. As adults, we have to finish the job our parents started.

And that’s the point of OneFamily. Even if you take the best parenting class of all time that gives you every answer you’ll ever need, you’ll only be able to walk away with a small percentage of the concepts. You can only absorb so much at one time. And every couple has life skills of parenting and marriage that have grown only so far, so concepts that won’t apply until years down the road tend to just fall away. Therefore, it’s wise to stay close to a source that provides needed value at the many stages of life.

One concept we came across that you’ll read often in these Letters is “Family Identity”. It’s so important to raise children with a sense of belonging to a unified team, it’s huge. Another important idea you’ll see here often is “Characterized”, how is your child characterized? It helps you decide whether their behavior on a particular issue is in need of guidance or not, a key discernment when parenting. Another important notion that defined our family is “Adventure-mindedness”, an openness to new experiences, tastes, discomforts, and ideas. Forming a child’s mental intake perceptions is so important when it comes for them to take on life’s challenges. These and many more concepts fill the OneFamily programs and Letters.

We at OneFamily, Rich and Shelly Howard and Dave and Lis Marr, have devoted the last 5 years to faithfully and lovingly provide many enriching ideas and OneFamily programs as a way to build up families and communities. We believe that strong marriages lead to healthy children who are successful in life, stronger in academics and sports, rich in relationships, solid in citizenship, and vibrant in their spiritual walk. It all starts with parenting.

However, like most human endeavors, we can’t do it alone. We need a community of like-minded believers in this ministry to come along side us so we can continue this blessed work. You can join us in several ways. By providing feedback and writing to us about your parenting and marriage successes and challenges, ask for help if you need it, engage with us. This lets us know we’re connecting and gives us topics to discuss. The amount of feedback we get is miniscule and your encouragement to us matters!

Another way you can team up with OneFamily is by introducing us to people who can use parenting programs, either families or churches. We all need to tend the garden and come together as a people. The difficulties of 2020 have isolated many families. OneFamily wants to be part of the solution.

Lastly, we could use your help financially. We are self-funded, no big donors out there carrying the weight. We have a simple idea – if we faithfully devote ourselves to enriching marriages and families with solid ideas for creating a great life, those families will thrive, and some will turn back around and participate with us to do more of the same. That’s it. That’s the OneFamily idea – Evangelize the ideas of marriage and parenting and the seeds will fall on fertile soil.

This year we have …

  • Provided 62 Workshops, classes and events in 2020 – In Person and Online via Zoom & Facebook Live
  • Over 700 Families directly impacted
  • 536,280 total online/social media impact (Impressions/Engagements) from our Daily Quotes and Tuesday Letters
  • 44,690 Current monthly online/social media readership worldwide
  • 6 couples took advantage of our new Marriage Assessments / Coaching
  • Created a private YouTube Channel to provide recorded replays of classes and workshops for attendees
  • Donation link: https://onefamilyhwl.org/donate-to-onefamily/
  • If you wish to learn more about OneFamily and ALL of our 2021 goals, or how you can directly participate in our 501c3 Nonprofit Organization, please contact Shelly Howard at shelly@onefamilyhwl.org

Your support of us helps us support you.  And if you have all the ideas you need for a successful life, how about helping us help your friends, neighbor, or church. We could really use your help. Thank you and God bless.

Lis and Dave Marr
Shelly and Rich Howard