Whether you are a family of two adults, or you have children, or even if you are single and relate to a family from a distance, it is important that you pay attention to fun as a healthy medicine for your relationships. While spontaneous fun is a wonderful experience of grace, most of us need to be intentional about making space for experiences of fun.
A healthy exercise for any family configuration would be to set aside some time to brainstorm together a variety of fun experiences that you might participate in. Be creative even in this brainstorming experience. Depending on your family, you might want to order a pizza, or pop some popcorn, or go to an ice cream parlor and order some sundaes as the setting for your family idea generating experience. (For health reasons, you might not want to do all three of these at the same time.) If you are single and are trying to relate to family members from a distance, you might even want to try a series of email exchanges.
You can set up your own boundaries, but I would suggest you try to come up with a variety of ideas, many of which cost very little. Some ideas should only take a short period of time but others might be vacation ideas or one day adventures. As you identify them, you might want to put them into categories. Some categories might be: Those that can be done at the last minute and those that take a lot of planning. Those that are free and those we need to save for. Those that are top priority and those that might be fun but are low on the list.
Especially if you are dealing with teenagers or adults, the calendar is the next step. It is easy for the creativity and excitement of the brainstorming to fall into the background if you don’t identify at least a couple of dates that you can set aside to begin to experience the fun.
If you have children, it would probably be fun for them to be given an important role in pulling off the experience. For example, if you are planning a game night with the family, what if the children were the ones that got to organize the games and plan the evening. If you are going to a movie, they get to choose the movie.
Because you are part of a family that is affected by emergencies in the congregation, all need to understand from the beginning that sometimes plans need to be changed. However, if you have them on the calendar, it is understood that if plans change, they should be changed to another specific date.
The important thing is for your family to become conscious about the types of experiences that they would enjoy doing together as a family. Stepping outside the seriousness of our lives and sharing in laughter and pleasure can be a good glue for family bonds.
