A few months ago, I sat down to write a chapter for a book, and I didn’t expect it to make me think so hard about my own life.
The book is called The Power of HER: Courage, Calling and Entrepreneurship, a collaboration with over thirty women entrepreneurs, each writing about what it means to build something that matters. My chapter is called “Leaving a Legacy: Faith at the Center of Business,” and if I’m honest, writing it forced me to ask myself some questions I’d been avoiding.
What am I actually building here? Not just The Encouraging Home, but everything underneath it, the writing about faith, marriage, parenting, serving, caregiving, the health coaching, encouragement to make better choices, the insurance work, the legal protection I help families put in place. Is it building toward something that lasts? Or is it just busy work dressed up to look like purpose?
Here’s what I landed on, after a lot of sitting with it.
A business rooted in faith isn’t measured by how big it gets. It’s measured by whether it’s faithful. Whether it serves the people in front of you well. Whether it points past itself, toward something bigger, even in the small, ordinary transactions that make up most of any given week.
That’s true whether you’re running a farm, raising a family, writing a blog, or helping someone improve their health, protect their future through insurance or legal planning. None of it has to be loud to matter. It just has to be faithful.
It all comes down to stewardship.
I think that’s the real thread tying every part of my work together, whether I’m writing an encouraging word for a tired mom, to homeschool or not, marriage joys and struggles, parenting encouragement, caregiving, walking a family through their life insurance options, or helping someone put a will in place before they need one. It’s all the same calling, wearing different clothes. Steward what you’ve been given. Do it faithfully. Let it point to something bigger than yourself.
If you’d like to read the whole chapter, along with the stories of other women who’ve wrestled with these same questions in their own businesses, The Power of HER is out now. You can find all the details, along with the rest of my books, here.
And if any part of this stirred something in you about your own business, your own legacy, or the people you’re stewarding right now, I’d love to talk. You can always reach out through Work With Mary.
Mary, The Encouraging Home
