How an Intentional Pursuit of Pure Pleasure Serves Our Families
I have participated in more small groups than I can count. During the initial “life story” testimony time, each participant, without exception, describes moments of tragedy, weakness, sin, and brokenness, met finally by the strong, redeeming grace of Christ. At the end of these exercises, one always senses awe at the pain everyone has felt and oftentimes caused.
And yet parents still manage to seem genuinely surprised when sin and “common weaknesses” manifest themselves in their children. Spouses seem shocked when a partner stumbles in any number of ways. Though a world population rapidly approaching 7 billion people proves that not one of us has ever reached moral perfection—that, in fact, few could even claim to reach moral excellence—we resent each other for falling short of perfection and even begin to define each other by our sin.
This stops celebration cold. The only chance we have for joy as fallen people living in a fallen world is the gospel of the cross and its corresponding truths of forgiveness and grace. Sadly, however—so very sadly—many Christian homes become places of judgment, accusation, and pronounced disappointment.
Here’s the stark reality: If you can’t love, celebrate, and enjoy raising a sinful kid, then you can’t love, celebrate, and enjoy any child. If you can’t love and play with a sinful spouse, then you’ll never be able to take pleasure in any spouse, for the simple reason that you can’t find any sinless kids or spouses.
Let’s not allow sin and our universal brokenness to stop our play, cease our celebration, or impair our ability to take pleasure in the company of each other. Parenting books stress the need to raise responsible kids, to teach them discipline, respect, self-denial, faith and self-control—good things all. But if we sing only that song, we’ll create tone-deaf, monotone families.
Families begin to break down when they stop enjoying each other; when the husband gives no thought to his wife’s pleasure and the wife no thought to the husband’s; when parents see kids only as projects to be improved rather than real people to be enjoyed, to laugh with, to play with, to relate to; when kids see their parents primarily as providers and disappointments; when family life offers little laughter but much criticism, plentiful stress but almost no play, a pressure-cooker of activities and obligations but no pleasure. Few families will survive, much less thrive, in such an oppressive atmosphere.
If you wisely put pleasure into play, you can restore broken relationships and maintain healthy, intimate ones.
Let me ask a simple question: Can your children ever relax in your presence? Do they feel as though they receive constant correction, constant teaching, constant rebukes? If so, then why do you wonder that they can’t wait to get away with their friends? Who wants to hang around a place perpetually devoid of pleasure?
Every healthy parenting relationship will require plenty of correction, discipline, confrontation, and instruction. Life is no perpetual playground! But if you build a family in which pleasure gets no or little thought, don’t feel surprised if it ultimately collapses into a joyless enterprise.