Leisure, Vacations, and the Family

William D. Gwinn

   The family unit has been fragmented so consistently in our United States culture that a close-knit family is becoming an increasingly rare phenomenon. With school in session much of the day, plus club activities and intramural or interscholastic sports, musical and drama events, and the time required to get to and from school, family time is reduced sharply. Many families do not eat breakfast together, and virtually none eat lunch together, leaving only dinner as a possible time for family sharing and fellowship.

   The increasing number of mothers working outside the home, whether out of desire or necessity, has deprived countless children of the availability of a mother to listen, console, encourage, or correct on children's arrival home from school. The concerted effort of various forces in our society to downgrade marriage, motherhood, and even the family as a valid basis of the creative order has done major damage to the whole concept of the family. The rapidly increasing acceptability of divorce as an easy solution to tension in marriage has placed into serious jeopardy couples who previously worked hard to resolve differences.

   Televisions, radios, stereos, and telephones, without disciplined

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control, have intruded seriously upon whatever time there may have been otherwise for the family to communicate about homework, dad's vocation, current events, and so on.

   Regular family devotional times are the exception rather than the rule even in the most well-intentioned Christian homes.

   Even the local church has clouded its own biblicalness by failing to acknowledge the centrality of the family as God's basic unit for evangelism, nurture, and outreach to a community. It is true, ironically, that the local church may be the most serious violator in fragmenting the family.

   Many pastors, in the course of being the legitimate shepherd of a flock, assume the role of spiritual priest for the family, usurping this God-established role from the father. Fortunately, more and more pastors are gearing their ministry around discipling men who can in turn lead their families, even to the point of enabling whole families to help families without a Christian father or any father at all.

   Local churches are programmed so heavily that it is all too rare to find a church which leaves more than one night a week, if that, for the family to be a complete unit together, let alone share their home with others. Various activities, however good they may be, need the scissor treatment in favor of higher priorities. Even pastoral staffs and church officers need relief from attendance at some events so their own families can stay healthy. We need to become more able to relax in seeing the local church dark some nights in favor of lighted homes.

   Departmentalization, a valuable device when held in check, has become the framework for the life of many local churches, not just the Sunday school. Whether prompted by space problems or by educational philosophy, primary and junior churches have been formed so that the family, in so-called family-centered churches, does not even sit together for worship. Even such family members as may be physically present within the same sanctuary do not sit together, thus losing a crucial "check and balance" value and often creating a side-room or balcony disturbance problem. Preaching as I do in dozens of churches each year, I am always pleased to find a church (and they are rare) in which families sit together and to find a service prepared with

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the entire family in mind. It is dramatic to note the difference in atmosphere when families sit together.

   The home, instead of being the center for witness, has become just a rest-and-repair center. As valuable as various programs of visitation have been, the Bible has far more to say about the ministry of hospitality than it does about visitation, other than of the widowed, elderly, and afflicted. How much better to invite a person, couple, or family into our home at their convenience than for us to intrude their castle at our convenience. Few encounters are more memorable than those we have with friends, new or old, in our home or in theirs. Home Bible studies, which are becoming more and more prevalent, are highly effective but there is also great need for the natural life-on-life contact in meal fellowship, conversation, the fun of playing together, and hopefully praying together. If we have healthy homes, we need to put them on display. If we do not, opening our homes will quickly reveal our weak spots so we can go to work on them.

LEISURE

   Every individual needs to call "time out" along the way to relax, repair, and recoup. This may be accomplished through sports, music, painting the house, reading, photography, gardening, a meal out with spouse, special outing with each of your children, exercise programs, an extra nap, make-it-yourself hobbies of various kinds, or a host of other activities.

   One of the most effective means of leisure is for the family to do things together — helping others, yard or house chores, touring a factory near your home, playing games, enjoying picnics with another family, having another family or friends of your children into your home. There is great value in activities of involvement rather than just spectator activities, as legitimate as the latter may be when in balance.

   In any case, it is crucial for most of us to reduce our pace so we can maintain perspective on life. The poem "Slow Me Down, Lord" says it well:

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Slow me down, Lord. Ease the pounding of my heart by the quieting of my mind.

Steady my hurried pace with a vision of the eternal reach of time.

Give me, amid the confusion of the day, the calmness of the everlasting hills.

Break the tensions of my nerves and muscles with the soothing music of the singing streams that live in my memory. Help me to know the magical, restoring power of sleep.

Teach me the art of taking minute vacations of slowing down to look at a flower, to chat with a friend, to pat a dog, to read a few lines from a good book.

Slow me down, Lord, and inspire me to send my roots deep into the soil of life's enduring values that I many grow toward the stars of my greater destiny.

Author Unknown                

If nothing else, we can all take "minute vacations." We can at least stop long enough to look at a flower, enjoy a sunrise or sunset, marvel at the moon and the stars, pet a dog, visit with a child or an elderly passer-by.

   As urgent as is the need to make Christ known, there is no justification for "workaholics" in the kingdom of God. Many are so obsessed, whatever their motivation, with the need for activity that they have little or no opportunity to enjoy life and to become the healthy, whole, well-rounded people who will be attractive to non-Christians. "Burning the candle at both ends" is not a wise or disciplined spiritual exercise, however piously defended. Private leisure moments are perhaps even more crucial than group ones, but hobbies and diversions which are strictly solitary in nature can tend to erode family unity to a major degree. They need to be shared in some way.

VACATIONS

   As valuable as days off and "minute vacations" can be, there is a crucial need for concentrated periods of time when families can get away from the usual routine and enjoy new places, new people, and new experiences. A vacation for a family is a time when everyone can do together things which are not normally possible with the day-to-day demands of pressured schedules and responsibilities. These diversions will express themselves in different ways with different families.

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   Whereas my work has been highly demanding in the summer, as a family we have faithfully taken time, even when we haven't had it, during the winter, sometimes taking the children out of school, to have special outings as a family. I only with there could have been more such times and that they could have been longer. So soon our children are gone, as depicted in the songs "Sunrise, Sunset" from Fiddler on the Roof and "Turn Around." Whatever could have been more important than the cherished memories of shared travel and adventure together?

   The board of directors of Mount Hermon Christian Conference Center near San Francisco, where I have served since 1957, initiated a special family vacation leave this past summer, in a desire to enable my wife and me to travel with our four children before they "leave the nest" since our oldest is twenty-one. Though we have done many special things together through the years, extended travel opportunities have never been possible, and especially not in the summer.

   We traveled 9600 miles around the western United States in a rented motor home for ten weeks. It was an experience unequaled in my lifetime in spite of an extensive six-week, eleven-thousand-mile trip my own family of eight took the summer of 1939 when I had my tenth birthday.

   We were able to visit old friends, churches of several denominations and styles of worship and architecture, sister camps, other countries (Canada and Mexico), experience other cultures and life-styles, see new places, have a host of new adventures, and enjoy several national parks (the Grand Tetons were tops with us!) and other scenic spots (Butchart Gardens were tough to beat). We backpacked down into the Grand Canyon and saw the Colorado River, bicycled around the rim of the canyon and many other places throughout the trip, water-skied, played tennis, swam in cold lakes and warm pools, rode horses through unsurpassed Colorado scenery, paddled canoes, threw Frisbees galore, picked wild blackberries, played golf in many beautiful venues such as Vail, Colorado where your ball (if hit well) goes much farther, slept out under the stars many nights, stayed on a dairy farm, saw a junior rodeo in Denton, Texas, dropped in on the Josephine County Fair in Oregon, and toured the Air Force Academy (the dishwashing department of which is larger than Mount Hermon's entire kitchen).

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We marveled at God's creative power and artistry expressed in so many ways — cloud formations, rainbows, sunsets, sunrises, moon and star shows, wildflowers, birds (including our first osprey, along the Rogue River), animals (including our first moose, in Yellowstone), rivers and lakes, rock outcroppings, and majestic mountains.

   We read, conversed, relaxed, recreated, and toured to our heart's content. We struggled with interpersonal relationships aggravated by crises without number and by the clash of six wills cooped up in one motor home. We learned much about love and forgiveness and how to adjust to one another, more than we'd ever faced at home. We learned so much from and about each other. I had prayed it would be an educational experience rather than a time of self-indulgence, and God answered my prayers. The trip's chief characteristic was limitless "teachable moments."

   Never before had we faced and solved so much in so short a time — cranberry juice on the carpet, boiling tea on a leg, a flashbulb burn in the Carlsbad Caverns (the camera itself was a crisis to be dealt with, though all are the enjoying the results), burned-out pilot lights, three flat tires in Texas in forty-eight hours, transmission problems at Tahoe far from mechanical help, carburetion headaches nearly half the trip in spite of four garage stops, varied other mechanical breakdowns (we learned to use tools and fix things we never had before), an unstoppable nosebleed, a stubborn ear infection, two near-fractures, maintaining a modicum of modesty in intimate, tight quarters (and learning to relax with the intimacy), wrestling a watermelon amid limited refrigeration space, meeting a school bus on a narrow one-lane mountain pass, being awakened by police and rangers in the wee hours in spite of previous permission, making beds without elbow room, dropping the soap in the tiny shower, finding the toilet won't flush anymore and no pumping station for miles, getting by with a broken dining table for several days, handling laundry with minimum storage and far-away laundromats, failing to switch gas tanks properly and being stranded in thick traffic for ninety minutes outside Yellowstone National Park, fighting a single fly or mosquito against brown walls, and many more. We always

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faced the crisis better if we'd had some time with God. It was a great help to have strategic memory verses mounted on the wall the last part of the trip to remind us all what the demands of Scripture were and where the power comes from to heed them. We also found it infinitely true that the family who prays together stays together. We wouldn't have if we hadn't!

   The opportunity to encourage various relatives and friends along the way and to share Christ with various ones to whom God led us kept us involved in a life laboratory of giving ourselves to others. One of the most dramatic of these opportunities was the privilege to spend ninety minutes with a former Seattle high-school classmate who, though still claiming innocence, is the convicted killer/kidnapper of Adolph Coors III. I was his first visitor in his fourteen years in the Colorado State Prison! We had a good visit. He was very warm and responsive. I pray that the seed sown will bear fruit.

   To bounce along (literally over the ever-changing landscape accompanied on the motor home's eight-track stereo by John Peterson's and Don Wyrtzen's new patriotic and prayerful musical I Love America gave us a bicentennial flavor hard to improve upon. Listening each week to tapes of Mount Hermon's Sunday worship service and Saturday evening concerts kept us plugged into the blessing of Mount Hermon without being operationally involved and aided substantially in the spiritual diet of our journey. Singing together as a family with tapes and books was a special delight. The chorus "'Thou Art Worthy" based on Revelation 4:4 became our theme song as we saw so much of what God had created.

   Whereas we were privileged as few are to make a trip like this, most families who have summer vacations could do the same and more, spread over several years. We all agreed it would be better to space it out. "Where" and "what" is less important than "that" time is taken for special experiences which will give breadth and depth to life, as well as lifelong memories. If we had waited until we could afford it, we would never have done it. We simply lowered all else on the priority schedule and gave it first place.

   Unquestionably the greatest value of vacations is "clearing the cobwebs,"

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taking a fresh look at life — its purpose and your goals — in a new and different environment. But also of great value is the opportunity to chisel rough edges from another (and parents come in for their share). The most crucial ingredients of life for any any human being to survive happily — acceptance, recognition, and self-worth — can all be infused in steady amounts in a vacation atmosphere. Respecting another's viewpoint, complimenting him or her for an expression or act, inviting interaction from the more reserved ones through good questions, and apologizing and forgiving especially after hard encounters all go far toward building up one another. We learned early in our trip that no one could survive in an atmosphere filled with the "put-downs" so common in routine family life, but we needed constantly to watch our stance toward one another. We could not afford to be careless in this when each day was full of so much pressure. It finally dawned on us it shouldn't happen at home either, unless carefully pondered so as to be "speaking the truth in love."

   It has been my observation through twenty-five years of counseling young people that few concerns have made them more bitter toward their parents or their parents' jobs or churches or other Christian involvements than the failure of many parents to give vacation experiences high priority each year. There is no way to justify the oft-heard statement. "We haven't had a vacation, at least away from here, for nearly ten years now." That's dedication, all right, but to the wrong thing.

A SPECIALIZED KIND OF VACATION

   Having served at Mount Hermon Christian Conference Center for eighteen years in youth and family camping and as president of Christian Camping International I feel that families need to be aware of the specialized kinds of vacations offered by Christian camps and conferences. Christian camping has become to the church in the past two decades what the Sunday school was in the first half of this century, now becoming an extension of the Sunday school away from the church plant. I use the term camping here in its broadest sense to cover both wilderness and facility experiences, both activity-centered and meeting-centered programming,

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both counselor-centered and speaker-centered approaches, both camps and conferences.

   Christian educators have come to believe that the concentrated experience which camping allows for a weekend, a week, or longer provides a laboratory in the lordship of Christ second only to the Christian home (or motor home!). Virtually every denomination and local church which is effectively touching lives for Christ employs camping in some major way, either for evangelism or nurture or both. Most major missionary agencies, both in the United States and in other countries, are building or renting facilities where they can have longer blocks of time in a more lifelike environment with the people they are seeking to reach or train. Young Life, Youth for Christ, Campus Crusade, Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship, the Navigators, and the Salvation Army all build much of what they do around camping opportunities. The Evangelical Alliance Mission and Overseas Crusades have both placed great emphasis on camping to accomplish their goals, as have many others. Today CCI, a world-wide affiliation of evangelical camps, has member camps in fifty countries. This is a phenomenal story of expanded ministry just in the last decade.

   Family camping, our specialty at Mount Hermon, has become more and more popular as a means of both evangelism and nurture. We seek to provide a total re-creational program for the family — spiritually, physically, socially, and mentally. Some opportunities are provided by age groups with peers, but most programming is built around family togetherness, from making beds to Bible reading, to sand sculpture at the Santa Cruz beach, to singing and worshiping together around the campfire, to roasting marshmellows and eating "smores" over a fire of coals, to being stimulated in the relevance of God's Word for family life by top resource people. Everything is programmed to facilitate family communication and comfortableness with one another. Every effort is made to remove masks and to encourage transparency, first with Christ and then with one another.

   Youth and children's camping has retained its popularity because "kids too need a vacation." And it is extremely valuable to have the supporting influence of a counselor of near age who reinforces what has been emphasized at home or by a pastor for

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months or years. The most successful youth camps are simulated family experiences in staffing and programming philosophy, and the goal is to send each person back into his or her family to be more supportive, cooperative, and contributory to the welfare of other family members, and as well to the church "family," all in the power of the Spirit rather than the flesh.

   With a longer unpressured time to get an audience for the gospel, and in a relational atmosphere of new adventure, acceptance, and accomplishment, many open their hearts to receive Christ. The seed sown by faithful parents, Sunday school teachers, pastors, youth workers, or other friends takes root and begins to bear fruit. Children from broken homes or homes lacking acceptance and love are helped significantly in a happy camp setting. (Camping is one of the best family substitutes available.) With daily study in the Scriptures, and time to deal with questions and doubts in an atmosphere of love and patience, Christians grow rapidly and begin to form strong, abiding life-goals.

   Many families rotate their vacations by taking an extended trip one year and then staying in a camp for a full week, often closer to home, another year, believing that the combination of a fun opportunity and supplementary spiritual input is too valuable to pass by. And many families budget to send their children to camp another week in addition to a family week because of the special values each provides.

   Specialized work, service, and wilderness camps, pastors/Christian writers/church music/and leadership training conferences, couples conferences (no children allowed), single adults conferences, senior citizens midweeks, and conferences of vocational groupings are some of the new opportunities being provided by various camps. Christian camps have become an extremely valuable tool to the church. More are being built, but existing ones continue to grow and maintain a high occupancy, not only in the summer but now year-round in many areas.

   Vacations take many forms, but every person and every family need them. Our Lord and his disciples did, and so do we the more, as life accelerates and becomes more complicated.

   I am so grateful to have been able this summer to practice

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what we at Mount Hermon preach, that all families need a change of pace and place, whether at a camp or elsewhere.

   I am confident the entire body of Christ would be stronger and healthier if we would pause long enough to get a good fresh look, at least annually, at our goals and values, as well as at our methods of achieving them.

   As valuable and necessary as personal vacations and vacations as couples are, do not forget the children. We all need this kind of qualitative and quantitative experience together. We need to nourish our family's health, for we need their closeness and support, and they ours, to be maximally effective in our witness for Christ in the world.

   The pressures of materialism will be offset when you return from vacations. Home never looks so good! We shall be much slower to take many things for granted again. We will seek even more to have our house be a true home, to be lived in, enjoyed, and shared — a place to be cared for to be sure, but not a neurotic museum as houses are to many people.

   Somebody needs to start putting the family back together again! We need some examples to launch a contagion in our culture that will reawaken in others a holy regard for the way God put it all together in the first place. As for me and my house, we are going His route. We refuse to let "the world around us squeeze us into its mold." (Romans 12:1, 2, Phillips).

_________________

William D. Gwinn is executive director of Mount Hermon Christian Conference Center, Mount Hermon, California. He is also president of Christian Camping International.

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