It's Game Night!

 

What family doesn’t enjoy a little game night now and then?  But at the same time who doesn’t dread a Monopoly Game that just. won’t. end?   Our family enjoys an assortment of games but can also get a little competitive resulting in our evenings not being as fun as we had anticipated.  I am very guilty of just wanting a fun game night with no scores. 

Recently we’ve been striving to make more designated family time for us to all spend some quality time doing things together as opposed to just being in the same house together.  We’ve found a few rounds of Dutch Blitz to be a great evening of “loving” name calling and fun.  Our 10-year-old daughter can’t say no to a game of Uno-any version will do, but she is partial to “Uno-Flip” at the moment.

I just picked up the old classic “BOGGLE” and have had fun playing it with just the hubby and I (of course once he gets in the groove, he kicks my butt).  We did find that the 90-second timer isn’t enough, so we do the 3-minute version of the game.

In my craft supply cupboard are a dozen boxes of Dollar Tree “Tumbling Tower Games” (aka Dollar Tree Jenga) that I have on hand to make holiday decorations and gifts (lots of fun and I’m sure I’ll post about them sometime).  Last week our daughter asked for permission to have a box to play with and off she went to play a game by herself and then to building towers and houses on the kitchen table. 

Getting the blocks out had reminded me of some fun jenga game twists I had seen in my Pinterest meanderings and prompted me to get another box of “tumbling tower” blocks out of the craft cupboard.   Hubby and I have been married for close to 18 years, have two teenage boys, a tween daughter, work in ministry, I manage one of our family’s multi-generational businesses, and sadly our personal relationship with each other isn’t always focused on like it should be. So, we've been trying to be more intentional with our time spent together.

I took to (carefully) scouring the internet for some fun idea/prompts to turn a simple game of “jenga” into a lot more fun for Hubby and I to play together….alone….when the kiddos are sound asleep, or at Grammas, or school, or just somewhere else…..   I got out my ink, poured the box of blocks on my desk, and stamped a pair of hearts on each end of every block so that this box of blocks is very easily distinguishable from any others, and then spent an evening brainstorming and looking up fun prompts, ideas, etc…. to write on each block. 

Hubby picked about my silly craft night as I concealed what exactly I was writing and looking up.  When I finished my creation and teased him by showing him a few blocks he suddenly was a touch more interested in this future game of “Jenga” between the two of us. I've shared a photo of our "Couples Tower Game", showing just the mildest prompt I included-creating this game allowed me to push aside the "ho-hums" of an evening spent together while still having control over what the prompts and ideas are going to be - unlike if we were to purchase a ready made "couples game" that we may find ourselves partially or fully uncomfortable playing.  

After finishing the creation of our ”2 player only-Couples Tower Game” (which is clearly labeled and stored safely in our bedroom) I took out another box of blocks to create a Family set.  Looking up prompts for this tower was fun and challenging as I want it to be fun for a 10-year-old girl, two teen boys, and us ol’ parents.  Hopefully I’ve succeeded.  I got the ink out again and divided the blocks into five piles, stamping a “v” on either end of each block in each of our favorite colors.  With a combination of physical activities, some brainy questions, a few open-ended questions, and a handful of animal sounds it should be a fun game to play around the kitchen table this summer.  

Even if our new tower game gets boring over the summer, it was a simple $1.25 purchase for some time spent with each other being silly and laughing together.  What are some fun things you do to intentionally spend time together with your family people?

What If?

Watching the weather channel this morning as we ate our continental breakfast at our hotel, I was dismayed at how much of the news they reported was devastation.  So little of it, if any, was encouraging.  No attempt was made to put any positive spin on a single story it seemed.  Even stories that hinted at some amazing human who was overcoming the odds was wound down focusing on the negatives and not the battles won.  Following our breakfast, we spent some time relaxing in our hotel room and I turned to watching aerial videos of the surrounding area and it’s beauty.  As I relaxed to the music and the beauty of God’s Creation and re-creation of our big blue and green orb floating in space called Earth, I was struck with what God has gifted us with and how much of it we take for granted. 

What if we spent time looking to our Creator and what he has gifted us with instead of what our “friend” on social media is doing, or said, or is complaining about?  What if we stopped comparing our lives to “all the people” and focusing on “all the things”?  What if we focused on what God did for us, truly focused on it and what it means for us?  What if we realized that our focus on the negativity that is exuded from the culture around us is affecting us on every single level of our lives?

I grew up reading Little House On The Prairie and other similar books.  I always remember the romanticized “simplicity” of the characters’ lives.  As an adult I understand that the hard, strenuous lives they lived were far from “simple”, but the emotional and mental strain they endured was focused mainly on their small little world.  I envy that.  Our Global mindset has us focused on EVERYTHING, EVERYONE, EVERWHERE.  God created us as amazing images of himself and in his awesome perfection and all powerfulness HE is able to be everywhere at all times.  I don’t believe our humanness, in it’s brokenness, is designed to mentally, emotionally, and spiritually deal with and process all the EVERY’s.   

I am just as guilty of this as anyone, and while our heartfelt reaction to trials and problems around the world is often to try to help in some way, how often do we actually reach out to help those close by?  Our world is so full of negativity and downward views that it has seeped into every facet of our lives.  Recently a good friend of mine commented on another friend’s social media post, and while they didn’t respond to our friends post online, they took the time to discuss, correct, and complain about the post with another friend.  Again, just as guilty myself of very similar acts.  Prior to social media, what our thoughts on a friend’s morning musings were, made no difference to anyone, but today, it’s part of our daily conversations.  Not uplifting, not encouraging, “just conversation” to fill dead air possibly?  It sure has me thinking about a lot of other ideas, ideals, and habits.  What if we start filtering the content we allow into ourselves, as well as filtering the content we allow to come out as well?  Isn’t there a childhood proverb in there somewhere, “garbage in….garbage out….”?

Privacy Lost

As I recall my husband’s proposal to me, a “couple” years ago, the details flood back.  The memories of him working behind my back to schedule my employees so I could take the night off from work, him whisking me away, the location and event he took me to, and the moment he started fumbling with something in his pocket during the encore song of the concert.  My delight in the box and the amazement that he was indeed asking me to marry him.  He had succeeded in accomplishing something I had always desired-a proposal I was 100% unaware was coming and a ring he had not only purchased without my knowledge, but had designed just for me.  I can share all the details with whomever I want, but that moment is forever ours, in our memories, and captured purely there without care of how we looked, how the camera angle was, how many likes, clicks, swipes, the information received on social media.  I cherish that.  Now, in all fairness, at that point in history, there was almost no social media.  I’m not sure MySpace was even a “thing” yet.  I DID have an e-mail address that I am sure I used to share our exciting news when I wanted to.  I once asked a good friend how he proposed to his wife shortly after he announced their engagement.  His response shocked me a little, “That’s our private story.”.  At the time I thought, “how silly.”.  Today, I applaud him for protecting his memories and story as our world goes crazy and narcissistic in feeling that everyone must need know our every move and piece of our story.  We have become a culture that has completely given up its ability to live in private moments.  Our precious times, shared with those closest to us are no longer shared simply between the few people in that moment. 

I remember reading an article, when my almost adult sons were very tiny humans, that encouraged NOT stopping to immortalize EVERY SINGLE event in photographs.   At first I thought it was a dumb suggestion.  We had digital cameras now and the ability to catch every exciting, silly moment and new step forever was too good to be true.  Why not use it!?  But, what was I missing scrambling for the camera or my phone to grab a picture before it disappeared?  I was missing the moment.  Sure, I could “re-live” the moment looking at the photo, but was I really IN the moment in the first place.  So often we stage our lives to make sure they are social media ready.  We invite people into some of the most private moments of our lives via social media.  Why?

Growing up we were always warned about “keeping up with the Joneses”.  Now, instead of keeping up with the Joneses or in our circle of friends, we have also weighted ourselves with keeping up with the Joneses all around the world.  Some of our most private moments must now be shown to the entire world to see how many likes and/or comments we receive.  And it’s become so commonplace that I don’t think the current generations, Millennials and Gen Z, even realize it’s anything but normal.  I joked recently with my husband that we are the tail end of the generation that has any privacy left at all and even we have succumbed to giving it away frivolously.  

I love to share in people’s joys and exciting moments, but open a social media app and it is flooded with, advertisements-they work that market flawlessly, and everyday happenings, private moments, precious moments, and more.  But my dear friends, are any of us actually LIVING in those moments?  Some of the people I know who are living some of the fullest lives and are the most content are the ones who post on social media the least.  Our need and desire for people to see us and know our story at all times has become a disease of sorts.  We invite everyone into some of our most private moments: our quiet times with God, our honeymoons, our intimate evenings with our spouses, our conversations with our children.  I find myself fighting with my desire to stop contemplating life and the trees and the fire in front of me as I enjoy a quiet evening outdoor with my family to take a photo because the world needs to see I am having a good moment.  Our inability to exist and enjoy life without others having to like or see what we are doing is becoming damaging to our psyche.  Are we able to exist without shouting to everyone that we are?  Are we able to simply take time to be in the moment, enjoy it, and carry on-sufficient in the knowledge that we did what we did, accomplished what we did, and no one may ever know about it?  Don’t neglect to share your joys and great news, but at the same time, guard yourself from inviting all the world into all your private moments with your loved ones and yourself.  Take time to LIVE in the moments instead of staging them and sharing with the world-it’s narcissistically focused on itself anyway.

Worry?

 

I recently stumbled upon a series of "worry" verses and realized how appropriate the timing was that I was finding, and in turn reading through, the verses and studying around them.  The very first selection I looked at was Psalm 127:1-5.  It always makes me smile when I realize that GOD is apparently putting something in my path over and over.

1

      Unless the Lord builds the house,

    those who build it labor in vain.

Unless the Lord watches over the city,

    the watchman stays awake in vain.

2 

It is in vain that you rise up early

    and go late to rest,

eating the bread of anxious toil;

    for he gives to his beloved sleep.

3 

Behold, children are a heritage from the Lord,

    the fruit of the womb a reward.

4 

Like arrows in the hand of a warrior

    are the children of one's youth.

5 

Blessed is the man

    who fills his quiver with them!

He shall not be put to shame

    when he speaks with his enemies in the gate.

It is so very comforting to know that no matter how hard we work, how hard we strive, how good we are at something; if GOD isn't in it, if our faith isn't in GOD, then it's all vain.   I am a person who does not like "the unknown".  I like to know how my day is going to go.  I want to know how customers are going to act and react.  I want things to be predictable, smooth, and running like clockwork.  GOD has an amazing sense of humor and dropped me smack dab in the middle of a world of unpredictability, where I so often find that I am just along for the ride.  

But knowing that if my faith is fixed on GOD and His truths, then nothing else really does matter.  I would much rather focus on the Peace that GOD gives, working on the tasks He directs, and building towards His Kingdom regardless of human regards; then to labor in vain on my own goals and aspirations.  

The second half of this Psalm turns around and looks at our children.  I've heard people so often talk about having a quiver full of children and the fact that a full quiver is such a blessing. I've never really understood what this verse was really getting at other than "you're so blessed with your full quiver.....".

Just today I was reading some notes that tag along with this verse in my Study Bible and now I see the verse in a whole new light:  This verse is referring to the gift of children that GOD gives us.  The children that we raise to be faithful members of GOD's people.  The children that then stand by us when they are grown as we face the enemies that come to our gates.  My job as a parent is to raise my children to focus on GOD, to have a Christ-like, servant heart.  And when the time comes, they will have the opportunity to stand side by side with us facing Satan and his demons, the trials of this world, the temptations that come our way; and boldly continue to proclaim GOD and his promises.

As I finish reading, meditating, and praying about these verses, my thoughts of worry and concern are pretty much washed away.  Replaced with excitement in the truth that GOD is on His throne, and through following Him not only I can stand boldly against the world and troubles, but my children and future generations can stand as well.

Spelunking, cell phones, and porn...

 A post I wrote a few years back....

Had the opportunity to take our three growing children on a spelunking adventure in Central Pennsylvania this week.  A great time away from the normal day-to-day and the heat for sure!  Daddy didn't have the chance to go with us, so on our return the boys sat down to show him all the pictures Mommy had taken.

As our eldest snuggled up on the couch in preparation to show Daddy the pictures we had snapped on the cell phone, Mommy unpacked from our time away, and Daddy quickly popped Little Princess up to her bed where she promptly fell asleep.  When Daddy returned to the living room to finish looking over the day of pictures with Little Man, he quickly backed out of whatever he was looking at on the phone and gave a guilty look at Daddy.  Fear flashed through my husband's mind and heart, as our "Little Man" is 10 and we have no delusions that he is very quickly becoming a "Young Man" in a culture where perversions and sex have been twisted into something ugly and unbeautiful as opposed to what it was created to be.  

My mind whirled over what on earth my son could have found on my phone in mere minutes that would have caused guilty looks.  Where had he gone via wifi in that short amount of time that would have caused him to feel as if he had done something wrong?  Turned out he just felt he had done something wrong because he was looking at pictures he didn't recognize-he had clicked out of my gallery of photos into "screen shots" of my phone that I had taken of silly pictures and crafts I wanted to try for later.

As my heart slowed down its race to beat right out of my chest and my husband had a talk with his son, who was slightly confused, I realized that this was a great wake up call and reminder that our son, as innocent as he is, is VERY quickly becoming a young man in a great big beautiful world, with very scary, dark corners.

Our three young people were snuggled in their beds with their new stuffed souvenirs of the day, likely dreaming about all the minerals and rocks they had panned for that day and were looking forward to identifying and playing with the next; and Mommy and Daddy had a chat.  Our children are not babies anymore (My Little Princess is quick to remind me of that, while my sons still adore snuggles and hugs-we just won't tell their friends).  One of our jobs as parents is to protect them as they grow and prepare them to navigate life and become wonderful, mature, adults all the while learning ourselves that they are needing to learn to protect and become strong themselves.

As a young girl, shortly out of college, I recall a friend who shared with me the struggles he had with porn.  Something he didn't wish to struggle with, and as a young, know-it-all college girl I couldn't understand why he simply didn't just make the choice to leave it alone.  But as I was thinking about my young sons and the struggles they are going to face in a dark world, I remembered what my friend had said all those years ago, "I saw something when I was 12 in a magazine, it made me feel weird, but I liked it, and I was afraid to tell anyone."  My friend hadn't gone looking for something as a sex crazed high school student or grown man and gotten sucked into an addiction of porn and perversion.  He stumbled upon it as a child and was afraid to ask an adult for advice, for help, for explanation as to why he was having perfectly normal feelings for a man to have, yet they felt weird or wrong.  The struggles that our men deal with in our culture don't just suddenly appear one day out of nowhere.  Twenty, thirty, forty, fifty, sixty, seventy, eighty year old men don't just suddenly find themselves struggling with something they suddenly became aware of.  They became aware of it as a young, impressionable child, possibly teenager (which you ask any mom, is still a child!) and without guidance, help, or direction they very easily spiral into the unknown at the whim of whatever culture and a sex crazed industry tells them.

My husband and I don't want our young men (or our little princess for that matter) stumbling around in the darkness of this world, finding and seeing things that they are afraid to ask about, to question, to have secret desires for, that they don't understand.  In our jobs, we see a lot of children of all ages weekly, and I have had the opportunity to sit down next to young men (mostly pre-teen) to have a quick talk with them about anything and everything only to have them quickly scroll their phone screen away or tuck it away in their pocket, but not before my heart screams out in hurt at the type of photos that I see sliding off their screens.  Our children are inundated, surrounded, immersed in a culture of sexual perversion, porn, and dark, dark lifestyles that are being hailed as more and more "normal" almost daily!  I unfortunately can not make much of a difference in the lives of these children that are not mine, but my husband and I will take every opportunity to nurture, inform, grow, teach borders and yes, at times, protect our young sons as they continue to learn how to navigate in this crazy world.

I actually thought our house was pretty locked down, but in the minutes between my son "looking guilty" and the realization that he simply thought he was in trouble for getting into mommy's phone where he wasn't supposed to, my mind had raced through all the ways he could have gotten anywhere "dangerous".  I realized that though their Kindles are locked out of the internet, we don't allow them to communicate with people on their Kindles, and our computers are password locked; our cell phones are almost always connected to wifi at home.  And though they do not have any social media accounts of any sort, my phone is constantly synced to my facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, e-mail, and just basic google.  

Recently I have been receiving many invites on my Instagram app asking me to "follow" them and to be allowed to "follow" me.  These invites' profile pictures are often provocative and I can only imagine the nature of their Instagram accounts.  What if my sons stumble into my Instagram account and find a new invite I haven't blocked yet?   What if my sons walk into the kitchen as I'm scrolling through suggested Pinterest boards and something inappropriate pops up?  There are so many "what ifs?", so many places that my children's innocence can be ripped from them simply on the internet that I myself am policing, let alone anywhere else in the world!  I am under no delusion that I want my children protected in a box of bubble wrap, rainbows, and unicorns, but I will take solid stands and even make choices that aren't my favorite in order to protect them, raise them in a way that we see fit, and hopefully promote their growth into healthy, mature young adults.

If it means missing out on an Instagram account on my cell phone-I didn't have instagram three years ago.  If it means having to sign into Pinterest on my computer every time I want to access a board-I didn't even have a smart phone six years ago.  If it means locking up the computer so google isn't available at the flip of a screen-I graduated college without ever using the internet!  So many of these things that have become such handy tools, distractions, and sometimes feel like necessities, extensions of our physical bodies almost......well, they aren't truly.  I am the first person that can immerse myself in Pinterest boards for hours, possibly even FOUR hours at a time, without a thought.  I can succumb to mindless facebook scrolling for untolds portions of time.  A "you've got mail" notification can pull me from the most serious task.  Distractions that are merely that for me, could become a life changing stumbling block for my dear children and their futures.  I'm not ready for those consequences.

I really want to encourage parents, guardians, teachers, anyone with children of any and all ages in your care; put up boundaries, guardrails, hedges, and then take another three steps back and set another.  Will I ever tell our children that Instagram, facebook, twitter, or any of the next cool social media platforms are bad and evil?  Nope.  Because quite frankly, they aren't and making all inclusive statements of that sort will not gain anything in the trust relationship with my children in the future.  But they will understand the dangers associated with those apps, just as we have explained the dangers of using the internet to communicate with people we do not know.  They currently understand that wifi, the internet, is not bad; but what comes through it can be, and some people use it to harm others.

My husband has begun to explain to our oldest that he's growing older and changing and he's going to start thinking about girls differently than he does now.  Imagine my horror when he asked me, "Mommy, is it possible to know now who I am going to marry when I'm grown up?"  Struggling to stuff my heart back down where it belongs, I managed to calmly tell him that it's not possible to "KNOW" right now, but some people DO find that when they grow up they end up marrying someone they have known and been friends with since childhood, "why do you ask?" (dreading the answer) His simple response before he headed back to his legos, "Oh, just wondered, because I have a couple I think I'd like it to be".  So thankful for an understanding husband as we begin to navigate these "pre-teen" years together!

If you're parenting a child of any age, please, please take steps to help them guard their hearts, their eyes, and their minds.  If you're going at it alone, please don't hesitate to find help in someone you trust, someone who has a heart for children and their precious hearts and minds.  God has given us our children, precious gifts to grow and nurture for Him in this crazy world, never be afraid to ask for help.  At the same time, never expect parenting to be easy and "fun" 100% of the time.  But DO expect it to be 100% worth it!