Bridge-Building: Hospitality

We were driving back from North Carolina, hitting that sweet spot in the drive: all four boys were happy and needing nothing from the parents up front.  So Mark and I were engaged in our favorite part of the journey-side of road trips - adult conversation.

Typically on these trips, I bring a book or three that are varied but practical.  As Mark drives, I'll read - summarizing things to him, reading him quotes, getting his opinions.  These road trip conversations have consistently moved our family forward; we've made life-simplification decisions, we've heard each others' hearts, we've recognized areas we've gotten off track, we've honed our priorities for our boys' schooling, we've gotten vulnerable about the good and hard of adopting/parenting in general.

For this trip, on a whim I had picked up Gretchen Rubin's The Happiness Project.  I thought it would be a fun and easy read for vacation - and it was.  But it also was a fantastic springboard for road-trip conversation.

Two of the categories in The Happiness Project included Being Serious about Play (leisure) and Making Time for Friends.  As I read some of the research and the stories that Rubin shared, we started to realize that we had been unintentionally sabotaging the fun and friend factors in our lives.  When we would be invited to something on the just-for-fun side of things, we would see our full schedule and the challenge of making it happen and then just give up, feeling like we needed to set boundaries somewhere.  But Mark and I are both extroverts, and we realized in our discussions that pushing through the initial too-tired feeling (in situations that would be enjoyable to all six of us) would result in an energizing experience.  Along those same lines, we had dropped the ball on growing deeper and also new friendships; we were predominantly engaged in fire-fighting relationships, important situations that had an urgency to them but could not (at least during the fire-fighting time) fulfill the mutuality needed in friendship.  While we recognized the value in continuing those relationships, we realized that we needed to be just as intentional in continuing the relationships that also fed us.

Shortly after we returned home, we were invited to join some families in some evening fun - no strings attached.  Yes, we had just returned from a 1500+ mile week.  Yes, we had just made it through the first week of school.  Yes, Mark had been extremely busy catching up at work after a week away.  However, because the situation was one that did not come with any expectations other than to be ourselves, it was a perfect time to test our new theory.  The results?  We needed to become better at taking time for fun, because it was so completely worth it.

We were ready to go to the next step - making fun with others in our home.  Hospitality had taken a sharp decline after we grew to a six-member family.  We wanted to identify the obstacles that kept us from inviting people over more frequently and then see what we could do either to remove those obstacles or to build a bridge over them.

And so began construction on bridge number four.