We still have a week of school left, but already I’m gearing the kids up for summer expectations. More and more, Lee and I have felt pressed to teach our kids how to fill their time wisely. This is a difficult task as it requires us to fill our time wisely. That whole “leading by example” mentality that’s supposed to be so effective in parenting, you know?
As we head into the summer months, my goal is to have plenty of fun activities planned, with a fair amount of downtime built in. So, without further ado, I give you…
The Stuart Family Summertime Agenda of Awesome
I doubt this will drastically curb the desperate pleas for help entertaining themselves, but hopefully it will give them a reference to look to instead of tugging on me day in and day out with all their woes of boredom.
This sign hangs proudly on the laundry room door, right outside the kitchen. It is our agenda of all the awesomeness that’s about to go down this summer.
See how exciting I’m making it sound?! Think they’ll buy it?
So sprinkled in between visits to Adventure Island and the beach, my hope is that all of us will enjoy a little more downtime this summer. Time spent reading, relishing the silence, electronic free mornings and maybe…juuuuuuust maaaayyybeeeee, my children who love to hop out of bed before the sun even peeks over the horizon will sleep in just a teeny, tiny bit.
All I’m asking for is 7:00 WHICH SEEMS ENTIRELY REASONABLE TO ME!
I’m not holding my breath…feel free to send coffee and Peppermint Mocha Creamer my way.
So tell me – how do you keep your kids active, engaged, and free from the summertime boredom blues? Do share!
Humans are amphibians – half spirit and half animal.
As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time. This means that while their spirit can be directed to an eternal object, their bodies, passions and imaginations are in continual change, for to be in time means to change. Their nearest approach to constancy, therefore, is undulation – the repeated return to a level from which they repeatedly fall back, a series of troughs and peaks.
…Now it may surprise you to learn that in His (God’s) efforts to get permanent possession of a soul, He relies on the troughs even more than on the peaks;some of His special favorites have gone through longer and deeper troughs than anyone else.
The reason is this. To us (the demons) a human is primarily food; our aim is the absorption of its will into ours, the increase of our own area of selfhood at its expense. But the obedience that the Enemy (God) demands of men is quite a different thing.
One must face the fact that all the talk about His love for men, and His service being perfect freedom is not (as one would gladly believe) mere propaganda, but an appalling truth. He really does want to fill the universe with a lot of loathsome little replicas of Himself – creatures whose life, on its miniature scale, will be qualitatively like His own, not because He has absorbed them but because their wills freely conform to His.”
C.S. Lewis – The Screwtape Letters (emphasis mine)
Life can throw us curveballs when we least expect it. Sometimes we barely manage to push ourselves off our knees before we’re brought low again. We are undulating through life in the ever constant shift between highs and lows, goods and bads, troughs and peaks.
This is where our passions, our imaginations, and our eternal, spiritually connected souls take shape.
I’ve spent the morning digging through The Screwtape Letters once again. When life feels curvy, I find solace in books. My anxious heart calms in the rhythm of the written word. There is equal comfort to be found in music, which Lewis describes in The Screwtape Letters (from a demon’s point of view) as “a detestable art…a meaningless acceleration in the rhythm of celestial experience.”
“Something like it occurs in heaven,” he writes. Then he describes laughter as producing a similar effect on the human soul.
I don’t know where you are in life today, whether you’re down on your knees, trying to dust off yet another disappointment, or recoiling from the aftershocks of unexpected news, but I offer you this encouragement:
Look for comfort in beautifully penned words, and seek the peace of the scriptures.
Listen to music that pulls you into that realm of celestial experience.
And, if at all possible (and it’s always possible), find a way to laugh. Look for fun wherever you might find it, and for however brief a time it may appear, for as Lewis writes, “Fun is closely related to Joy – a sort of emotional froth arising from the play instinct.”
I watched this film last night, and I was struck by the simple beauty of the message. Don’t let life pass you by. Grab hold, live full, go big, and stay in it. Don’t miss the beauty of the moment lost in day dreams, or mired down in the need to document each moment in time.
Two main characters captured this film, though we only saw one of them for a few brief moments at the end. Walter Mitty was a man who let the difficult moments of the past define his present. He quit living when tragedy struck, and he pushed aside his dreams and passions for a life of practicality.
The consequences of this decision left him with nothing but his imagination, and he lost himself in daydreams, longing for a life he might have known if he hadn’t let it slip through his fingers.
The other character, Sean O’Connell, was a famous photographer, a man who grabbed life by the horns. He had no address, no phone, nothing but his camera, and his vision of the world around him. They were unlikely friends, a relationship having been forged through letters and photographs, until Walter needed to track Sean down to find a particular photo, and he finally began living life. Really living life.
When he finally caught up to Sean on a mountaintop in the Himalayas, he watched as the man let the beauty of nature sink in. Though Sean’s camera was set up and ready to capture an elusive moment in nature, when it finally came around, Walter wanted to know why he didn’t snap the picture.
“Sometimes if I like a moment…I don’t like to have the distraction of the camera,” Sean said. “I just want to stay in it.”
I love this line. In fact, I really liked this movie. I loved the message, and I found myself chewing on it for a bit as I drifted off to sleep. I think that everyone has the potential to fall into the trap of Walter Mitty. We all let life swing past us as we give in to responsibility, to laziness, to fear, or simple apathy.
We could all use a little more “Sean O’Connell,” though.We could all stand to grab life by the horns just a little more. To live fully and bravely in this world that threatens to pass us by.
The real trick is recognizing the moments when we simply need to stay in it. Without the distraction of a camera, of social media, of the pressure to document and record. We just need to stay right there.
Right here.
As kids finish up school and you head into summer, I encourage you to make every effort to stay in the moment. Don’t be afraid to unplug, to step away, to capture a moment by living it rather than recording it.
I’m issuing myself this very challenge, and maybe together we can push each other forward to a life more fulfilled, more purposeful, and better captured than we thought possible without the benefit of a device in hand.
We were a rag tag group, a gaggle of teenagers, most of whom were leaving US soil for the very first time. It was 1995, and the dust was still settling from the fall of the Iron Curtain.
“Don’t get over there and be loud and obnoxious,” our leader advised us before we left. “Show them that American teenagers actually do have some self control.”
We tried to do this, and most of the time we succeeded. We avoided squealing and shouting over every new experience, although being tricked into eating cow tongue on our first night in Minsk, Belarus was just short of a cruel introduction into this strange new land.
The smells are what I remember the most. That and the cold. When we stepped off the plane onto a frigid tarmac, the sky around us was grey. For a brief moment, I felt as though we’d stepped into a black and white film as the grey pavement extended into the grey horizon in such a way that made all the land before us seem devoid of color.
Oddly enough, I felt right at home.
As we entered the concrete terminal, I listened closely to this foreign language. It was the first time I’d ever heard Russian, and the words sounded like poetry. At least that’s the way I remember it. At the time, I know I was a little shell shocked. Jet lag combined with an awe and fear of the unknown didn’t leave me much time to ponder the poetic nature of my current reality.
I just remember feeling like I knew that place.
For two weeks we toured the land, and as I remember those adventures, the landscape slowly fades into this technicolor memory. It lights up as I explore the moment that I first learned who Lenin was, and what he had done. It bleeds into the first moment I stepped into a Russian Orthodox church, and realized exactly what the word “history” means.
Suddenly 1776 no longer seemed that interesting to this All-American girl. Not when I was confronted with the stories of a land that dated back to 1067. I couldn’t even fathom the amount of story that the buildings I stepped into held.
The world changed for me on that trip. I stood in Red Square in Moscow, and I looked at St. Basils, and I had no idea how to process the world as a whole. When I walked through Lenin’s tomb, and viewed the body of a man both hated and revered depending on who you spoke with, I couldn’t wrap my mind around my smallness in this world.
All I knew was that I wanted to see and experience more of it.
Lee and I have been talking a lot, lately. Dreaming, really. We dream of exposing our children to more of the world, of opening their eyes to their smallness in this great, big land.
I’m so grateful to my parents for encouraging me to experience life to the fullest. I’m so thankful that they saw the importance of travel, and that they not only allowed me to explore this globe (usually without them), but they generally pushed it. Without their willingness to let me go and experience life through travel, I wouldn’t be who I am today.
Our kids are still young, and there are some boundaries within which we feel like we must operate as a family, but we have dreams. We dream of showing them the world, of giving them a taste of it now, while they’re young. Our biggest, most-unlikely-but-still-fun-to-discuss dream is to someday live overseas for a time. I don’t know if that will ever happen, but we do love to imagine the possibility.
We’ve started the process of exposing them to the world outside the United States, and we have hopes, dreams, and loose plans to do more traveling with them in the coming years. As we do this, I pray that there will come a moment for each one of them when the Lord gives a coming home moment – a slice of time that will serve as a technicolor memory.
I can’t wait to see how they use those memories in the future.
Tell me your story. Have you had the chance to expose your kids to new experiences through travel, either inside or outside the country? How have you done this, and how has it impacted your family?
I watch her tenacity, and I find myself envious at times. My eight year old knows exactly what she wants, and when she puts her mind to something, she doesn’t let anyone get in her way. Her determination and quest for accomplishment are amazing. A goal, no matter how big or small, is all the motivation she needs to put in the hard work, to go the extra mile. And, so far, she has accomplished all that she set out to do.
She is teaching me, reminding me, what it’s like to pursue a goal without fear of failure, and to dream without concern for what others might think.
Something happens when we grow up. We become so predictable, so practical, so…safe. We think through every possible scenario, every outcome that could result from a decision, and more often than not, we choose the path with the least likelihood of road blocks.
Some of that is simply out of necessity. When you have bills to pay and mouths to feed, you cannot live life on a whim. Decisions have to be made with a heavy amount of respect for the future. Sometimes, however, (many times?) we let practicality be the boss of us. We fear a path of imaginary destruction.
But if we choose to follow a different path, one that is less practical on paper, and the road is rockier, the terrain filled with more ups and downs, and the ultimate outcome less guaranteed, then does that mean we made the wrong decision?
All of these people inspire me to live more intentionally. They have each taught me through both their words, and their actions, that life doesn’t have to be predictable, and you can still be responsible while chasing the things you love.
Living a little outside the lines requires that we make a few sacrifices. We can’t be confined to that which is predictable, and we certainly can’t expect the path to be easy. Fulfilling? Yes. Exciting? Most definitely. Challenging? Without a doubt. Responsible? Depends on who you ask.
But easy? Rarely.
Dreams and goals shouldn’t be laid to rest with childhood. We can still be responsible without being predictable. And the beautiful truth is that if we’re willing to make those sacrifices – if we’re up for the challenge of living intentionally, and doing the hard work necessary to live our lives in pursuit of the things that will leave a longer lasting impact than the boundaries of a 401K, we might find that something beautiful occurs.
We may just carve a different path for ourselves, for our children and for the world around us.
