A Home That Is Fun

I'll pass along an extended quote this morning from, 'Disconnected: Parenting Teens in a Myspace Word.' I briefly mentioned this book yesterday, but it's one I'm continuing through and finding both practical and insightful. Written by Chap and Dee Clark, it is filled with thorough research, convicting conclusions, and helpful directions. This quote is from Chapter 8, and found on pages 111-113:

"As parents your task is to make sure not only that your home is a stable and solid environment but also that the feel of your home is warm, light and even fun. How much needs to be written about this? Who doesn't know fun when they see it? Well, according to our research and experience,most adults wouldn't know fun if they got hit with a water balloon! In a word that is as dark, lonely, and burdensome as ours, one of the greatest gifts we can give our kids as they grow up is the gift of lightness, joy, and crazy adventure. One of the greatest thinkers of the last century, C. S. Lewis, once wrote:

'When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty, I read them openly. When I became a man, I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.'

"Lewis' ability to live out of that free and wondrous place where God's beloved children romp was evident in almost every one of his written works. This is the man who wrote one of the most stirring accounts of the wild, abandoned life we have in modern literature, the playful joy between the newly resurrected Aslan and Lucy and Susan in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe:

'Aslan leaped again. A mad chase began. Round and round the hilltop he led them, now hopelessly out of their reach, now letting them almost catch his tail, now diving between them, now tossing them in the air with his huge and beautifully velveted paws and catching them again... It was such a romp as no one has ever had except in Narnia; and whether it was more like playing with a thunderstorm or playing with a a kitten Lucy could never make up her mind. And the funny thing was that when all three finally lay together panting in the sun the girls no longer felt in the least bit tired or hungry or thirsty.'

"We are not saying you need to be a different person than who you are. But we are saying, for most adults, you need to figure out how to release the lighter side of your soul and share that lightness with you kids. As author Brennan Manning once said, 'If you know the love of God, and have experienced the forgiveness of the Spirit, and you have been embraced by the Father, then, please, notify your face!'"