Here’s this woman who runs an organization called The Mission Driven Mom, has a Master of Liberal Arts, has built what looks like a remarkably coherent curriculum for women—and I assumed her backstory was relatively “normal.”
Then she told it.
Seventeen children in a blended family. A father dead of an aneurysm when she was sixteen. A stepfather with seven kids of his own showing up in a van, towing a trailer, everyone moving into one house. Her mom, widowed and traumatized, crying every day. In the chaos, Audrey effectively co-parenting her younger siblings while still a teenager.
And on my side of the screen, I was realizing in real time just how similar some of our stories were. My mother also died of an aneurysm when I was sixteen. I also came back from Europe into a brand-new family configuration I had not been consulted about.
Both of us, in different places and different ways, had to discover what it meant to be “created in the image of God” in the middle of pain, confusion, and family complexity that could be described—without exaggeration—as biblical.
What struck me most, though, was not just Audrey’s story. It was what she did with it.
She turned that pain and confusion into a map.
A map she distilled into what she calls the Seven Laws of Life Mission—and then aimed squarely at the people the culture most undervalues and most depends upon: mothers.
In this article, I want to share why I think Audrey’s framework matters so much, especially if you’re a mom, and how it connects directly to the claim that anchors my show: you were created in the image of God.
Ordinary Lives, Extraordinary Missions
One of the catalysts for Audrey’s work was: The Hiding Place, the story of the Ten Boom family in the Netherlands during World War II.
That powerful book tells the story of how the Ten Booms hid Jews from the Nazis in a secret room and saved over 800 lives. That alone would be enough to place them in the “extraordinary” category.
But Audrey dug deeper. She read Corrie Ten Boom’s other books. She went back generations to understand the family’s formation. She discovered, as she put it, that the people we meet in The Hiding Place were not always “polished and put together.” They had problems. They had ordinary struggles. They were not born saints.
So she began asking a question that sits very close to the beating heart of my show:
How do ordinary people become capable of extraordinary good?
Put differently: if we really believe we are created in the image of God, then why do so many of us feel so unprepared for life? Why do we go through 15 or more years of schooling and come out the other side unable to build a healthy marriage, raise children, navigate addiction, or withstand the collapse of extended family around us?
Why, as Audrey described her younger-mom self, do so many women—especially mothers—feel like they are simply drowning?
Her answer did not come from a new self-help hack. It came from returning to something very old: the natural law, the wisdom tradition embedded in Scripture and echoed across the great books and lives of history.
She read widely. She studied people like the Ten Booms, Clara Barton, Albert Schweitzer, Martin Luther King Jr., Mother Teresa—men and women whose contribution to humanity is almost universally recognized as good.
And she noticed a pattern: a set of repeated choices these people made, over and over, that transformed them from ordinary to extraordinary.
Those choices became the Seven Laws of Life Mission.
The Four Foundational Laws: How Image-Bearers Grow Up
The first four laws are what Audrey calls the foundational laws. They are not “once and done.” They are patterns we return to for the rest of our lives.
Here’s the briefest sketch:
- Love God – Establish Your Divine Center
Audrey is unapologetically Christian. But she is also realistic: it is not her job to dictate anyone’s denomination. Her insistence is simpler and more radical:- You cannot be a law unto yourself.
- You must submit to a source of truth beyond yourself.
Call that God. Call that the Creator. But unless there is a reality higher than our moods and our social media feeds, there is no fixed point by which to steer.
- This aligns exactly with what we explore on Created in the Image of God. In Genesis, God sets the sun and moon “to rule the day and the night.” When He then creates humanity, “male and female,” He grants them sovereignty under His own rule. Our freedom and dignity as image-bearers are dependent on our alignment with that greater Light. When we drift even “one degree” off course, we do not become “more free”; we become enslaved to something else.
- Love Yourself – Strive for Self-Mastery
During the show, I had a small epiphany on air. We were talking about Jesus’s two great commandments:- Love God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength.
- Love your neighbor as yourself.
- I realized how often I’ve glossed over that middle assumption. The command to love my neighbor as myself presupposes that I do, in fact, love myself—that I care for myself, steward my own body and soul, and regard myself as worthy of attention and growth.
Audrey has built an entire law around this neglected piece. She unpacks it as:- Self-care – meeting your real needs, not indulging every want.
- Self-management – governing your thoughts and emotions.
- Self-discovery – doing the hard work to understand who you actually are and what you’re called to bring to the world.
- She told a striking story about Mother Teresa. In the early days of her work in the slums, Mother Teresa pushed herself too hard: not sleeping enough, giving away the food she brought for herself, ignoring her body’s limits. Her health collapsed. The lesson? Even someone as sacrificial as Mother Teresa could not serve her mission while violating basic self-care. Loving others required properly loving herself.
- Love Truth – Live a Principle-Centered Life
Here Audrey reintroduces what used to be basic to a good education: the existence of principles—objective truths about human beings and the moral order that do not fluctuate with trends.
Drawing from the natural law tradition, from Scripture, and from thinkers like Stephen Covey, she teaches women to:- Recognize principles (e.g., justice, honesty, stewardship, covenant).
- Write them in actionable form for themselves.
- Practice them concretely in daily life.
- In my own spiritual journey, I have had a fairly painful evolution - to distinguish between doctrine (which can be interpreted and misinterpreted) and the deeper realities Scripture points to. Jesus promised: “You will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.” Audrey is, in effect, translating that promise into a curriculum.
- Love Humanity – Become a Servant Leader
The fourth foundational law is where the earlier work overflows into others.- Not as control.
- Not as celebrity.
- But as servant leadership.
- This is where Audrey has women study history, worldviews, and world religions—not to flatten all differences, but to understand people well enough to serve them wisely.
Here again, her approach resonates deeply with my own Facets of One project. When I asked whether the Shema—“Hear, O Israel, the Lord your God, the Lord is One”—had analogues in other religions, I discovered it does. Every major tradition, in its better moments, affirms a single, ultimate reality and calls human beings to align with it. The language differs. The facet of the diamond you’re looking at may differ. But the light is one.
Servant leadership requires that we see those shared truths. We cannot love humanity well if we’re busy fighting over labels and missing the common core.
These four laws—loving God, self, truth, and humanity—are the formation that most of us never received. We received information, credentials, and distractions. But we did not receive a systematic invitation to become the kind of people who can bear God’s image well.
Mothers of Creation: Why This Matters So Much for Moms
Now here’s where Audrey’s work becomes especially relevant—and especially countercultural.
Through decades of feminism’s more corrosive strands, motherhood has often been treated as a consolation prize, a secondary path, something you do “if you can’t do anything else.” Staying home with your children, especially, is frequently framed as “wasting your potential.”
The social conscience, to use Stephen Covey’s language that Audrey invoked on the show, has shifted. Where previous generations saw motherhood as honorable, sacrificial, and central to the health of civilization, much of our modern Western culture now sees it as an obstacle to “real” achievement.
The result? Women sitting in auditoriums, as Audrey once did, crying quietly because they feel:
- Depleted and resentful.
- Guilty for wanting more and guilty for not wanting more.
- Lost in a fog of other people’s needs, with no clear sense of self or mission.
Audrey recognized that pain because she had lived it. Married young. Told she might be infertile, then instructed to get pregnant quickly. A husband battling pornography addiction. In-laws going through a bitter, years-long divorce. Her own mother in a rocky remarriage. Three babies by her late twenties and the distinct feeling: I am not prepared for this. At all.
It was out of that crucible that The Mission Driven Mom was born.
And with it, a theme she has chosen for their annual conference that dovetails beautifully with Created in the Image of God:
Mothers of Creation.
To call a woman a “mother of creation” is not flattery. It is theology.
In Genesis, when God creates humanity, we’re told: “Male and female created He them.” Both bear His image. Both receive the mandate to “be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth and subdue it.” That fruitfulness is not only biological; it is cultural, spiritual, intellectual.
Mothers participate in God’s creative work in a profoundly immediate way:
- They literally co-create new life.
- They shape souls.
- They build the moral and spiritual architecture inside human beings who will go on to build—or destroy—cultures.
When Audrey gathers women under the banner “Mothers of Creation,” she is not giving them a feel-good slogan. She is inviting them back into the reality the culture has forgotten: motherhood is a frontline vocation in the drama of redemption.
And the seven laws of life mission are, in many ways, a blueprint for how mothers can inhabit that vocation without burning out, losing themselves, or absorbing the lies of a culture that has lost its bearings.
The Leadership Laws: From Survival to Mission
The first four laws are about formation. The last three are about activation:
- Hear the Call
- Courageously Execute
- Repeat
Once a woman is re-centered in God, has learned to care for and govern herself, has begun to live by principle, and is oriented toward serving others, she can begin to see where her unique gifts intersect with the world’s real needs.
That’s what Audrey means by “mission.”
It doesn’t have to look like starting an organization or writing a book. It might be:
- Launching a small reading circle for neighborhood kids.
- Quietly mentoring younger moms at church.
- Creating a new system in the home that brings sanity to chaos and dignity to everyone involved.
- Volunteering in a local school with a principled, long-term mindset.
In the Mission Driven Mom Academy, before graduation, each woman undertakes a “mission project” that deliberately pairs:
- What she’s discovered about her God-given gifts and talents.
- A concrete need in her family or community.
Then she acts. She executes. And, crucially, she does it in a way that doesn’t abandon her family, but brings them along.
This, to my mind, is one of the most important correctives Audrey offers. Too often, the only models we see of “mission” are either:
- Hyper-individualistic: “Go find yourself out there; your family will adjust.”
- Or self-erasing: “Your only calling is to keep everyone else afloat; you don’t get one.”
The seven laws point to a third way:
- You are called.
- You do have a mission.
- And part of that mission is precisely how you love, lead, and form the people in your home.
That’s not small. That’s not “just” anything. That is the very front line where the image of God in the next generation is either nourished or neglected.
Created in the Image of God: Male and Female, Sovereign and Sent
When I named my show Created in the Image of God, I had something like this in mind.
Being an image-bearer is not a static label we place on ourselves. It’s a trajectory and a responsibility.
- God places the greater and lesser lights in the heavens “to rule the day and the night.”
- He then creates human beings and gives them delegated sovereignty over the earth.
- That sovereignty is real—but it is conditional. It remains healthy only as long as we are turned toward the Light.
When we submit our will to God (Love God), when we rightly steward ourselves (Love Yourself), when we align with objective truth (Love Truth), and when we pour ourselves out in principled service (Love Humanity), we are, in effect, growing up into the image we were created to bear.
The last three laws—hearing the call, executing, and doing it again—describe life as a continual cycle of being sent. Not in grandiosity. Not in self-promotion. But in faithfulness.
And here, I want to say something directly to mothers:
If you are in a season where your “mission” looks very small from the world’s perspective—changing diapers, reading bedtime stories, refereeing sibling disputes, holding a teenager who is falling apart—do not underestimate the cosmic importance of what you’re doing.
The Ten Booms did not start by hiding Jews in a watchmaker’s house. They started, decades earlier, with small, principled acts of faithfulness in a family. By the time the crisis came, they had become the kind of people who could say “yes” at great cost.
The same is true for you.
Where to Go from Here
If this resonates with you—especially if you’re a mom who feels both the weight and the confusion of your role—I encourage you to do three things:
- Watch (or rewatch) the full episode with Audrey Rindlisbacher.
We barely scratched the surface here. Hearing her tell her own story—and unpack the seven laws in her own words—is worth your time. - Explore The Mission Driven Mom and The Mission Driven Life.
Audrey has spent decades doing the slow, careful work of turning timeless principles into an accessible path. Her academy, podcast, and upcoming “Mothers of Creation” event are designed to form women, not just inspire them for an afternoon. - Reflect on your own formation.
Where are you strong among the first four laws? Where are you weak?- Are you centered in God—or mostly in your news feed?
- Do you treat yourself as a steward of God’s image—or as an afterthought?
- Are you anchored in principles—or tossed by trends?
- Are you moving toward servant leadership—or just surviving?
You do not have to have this all figured out tomorrow. You don’t need a perfect origin story. You don’t need a “platform.”
You were created in the image of God.
That means you were created for mission.
And if you are a mother, that mission is already underway—every time you choose, in a hidden corner of the world, to love God, to steward yourself, to cling to truth, and to serve the human beings He has placed in your care.
Those are not small acts.
They are the beginning of an extraordinary life.
If this conversation about mission, motherhood, and the image of God stirred something in you, I invite you to go deeper. Watch my full *Created in the Image of God* episode with Audrey Rindlisbacher to hear her tell her own story and unpack the Seven Laws of Life Mission in her words. Then visit The Mission Driven Mom to explore her book *The Mission Driven Life*, the MDM Academy, and the upcoming “Mothers of Creation” event. And if you’d like to see how this all connects to my broader work on unity and natural law, keep an eye out for more here on Substack and for the launch of my *Facets of One* project.
Next week on *Created in the Image of God*, we’re turning from mothers of creation to the crisis—and renewal—of the church itself. I’ll be joined by Dr. David Gushee, one of America’s leading Christian ethicists and author of *The Moral Teachings of Jesus*, to talk about why so many evangelicals feel their movement has lost its way, and why he believes a “post-evangelical” Christianity centered again on the way of Jesus is quietly being born. We’ll explore what it means to return to Jesus Himself—not as a political mascot, but as Lord, Teacher, and moral center—and how that might reshape our witness in a fractured culture. If you’ve ever felt disillusioned with the label “evangelical” but unable to walk away from Jesus, you won’t want to miss this conversation.
