bekahcubed

Prompt #8: “Was your family musical, athletic, bookish? What sorts of activities were encouraged in your household?”

While some families are hard-core music people or hard-core athletes–and the children have little choice but to follow that same path, our family wasn’t/isn’t hard-core about anything but Christ.

Following Him was very much an encouraged activity. Everything else was extra.

Not that music wasn’t a part of our household–it definitely was. All of the kids but me took piano lessons and many of them got quite good. A handful of us serve on the worship teams at their respective churches (I am not one of that handful.)

Grace has taken music the farthest, I suppose, lettering umpteen-zillion times in band, show choir, and choir. But even her involvement is more circumspect than that of many youngsters. Until her senior year, she participated in only one group at a time–band first, then girls’ show choir, then finally deciding to do both girls’ show choir and regular choir together.

So music, I suppose we could be almost considered a musical family.

Sports? Not so much.

Joshua did football and track for a year. I think Timothy ran track for a year or two as well. Other than that? Zip, zilch, zero.

A number of the youngers (all those younger than me, actually) played church league softball during the summer, but that’s about the extent of our athletic involvement.

Books?

Even books are a tricky one. Certainly Mom was a reader (as seen last week). And Dad was an information-junkie.

But does that mean we’re all bookworms? No, not really.

Half of us are tried and true bookworms–a couple of us not so much.

So…what was encouraged in our household?

We were encouraged to be curious, to ask questions, to articulate answers. Sometimes that took the form of reading, sometimes of writing, sometimes just discussing the issues of the day.

This curiosity has held through into our adult lives, where some of us are writers, some of us are scientists, some of us are simply thinkers.

We were encouraged to serve, to find what needs to be done and to do it, to glorify God by serving His body and the lost.

This commitment to service has translated into our adult lives, where many of us our highly involved with our local churches and where many of our professions (whether medicine or military or manual work) focus on service.

And we were encouraged to walk in relationship with God through Jesus Christ.

We were Jesus people. Church people.

Not athletes, readers, or musicians.

Christians.

I am overjoyed when I see that my siblings have not left Christianity as a “childhood activity”, but have continued on in their walks with Christ.

So tell me, what kinds of activities were encouraged in your household?

I probably gave away part of my answer in last week’s post–but I figured a continuation wouldn’t be bad. This week’s prompt asks about the sort of activities, “extra-curriculars” if you will, were big in your house growing up.

Was your family musical, athletic, bookish? What sorts of activities were encouraged in your household?

Of course, you’re more than welcome to talk about your children or now if you so choose.

While my dad has confessed that he has read maybe one work of fiction in his entire life, my mom was and is an avid reader of fiction.

When I was young, her genre was Christian romances (she has since moved on to science fiction–the epic sorts that are thousands of pages long).

I can’t remember where she kept her novels when I was still in elementary school–it couldn’t have been upstairs because there wasn’t any extra room to be had there. But when the four oldest of us moved to the basement and Mom and Dad moved into the master bedroom, Mom and Dad’s old room became the “school room”–and the home of at least two full-length shelves of Mom’s novels.

Anna and I started reading Mom’s novels by fifth or sixth grade at least. By the time Anna was in her teens, we had developed a rather regular habit of having her read to us–me, her, Joshua, and Daniel all gathered in the boys’ room. Anna started, I think, with one of her favorites–Janette Oke’s Roses for Mama. Once we were done with that, we read A Woman Called Damaris, the other book in the large volume Mom owned. The tradition continued on into our later teenage years. We read dozens of books. The last series we read together like this (I think) was Dee Henderson’s–actually, we might of read all of Dee Henderson this way.

That’s not to say that the only reading we borrowed was what we read together. Anna and I voraciously devoured every book Mom owned–and most of the ones she brought home from the library too. We all of us girls were big readers.

We come by honestly, too, since Mom’s mom was and is a reader too. Mom talks about Grandma’s Readers Digest condensed books–and I can’t forget going to Grandma and Grandpa’s and roving through Grandma’s bookshelves and boxes for something novel to read. Of course, there were always plenty of options.

Prompt #7: “Were there books in evidence around your house? Was there a special room in the house considered the ‘library’? Which of your parents’ books do you remember reading? Which books do you remember them reading?”

We had a small house, certainly too small for a “library”–but we had books, that’s for sure.

We had two tall bookcases in the living room, one on either side of the door that led first to Mom and Dad’s bedroom and later to the schoolroom.

The bookshelf on the right contained three sets of encyclopedias–a children’s set, a set of Comptons, and the Encyclopedia Britannica. The bookshelf on the left bore a multi-colored set of illustrated children’s classics and a collection of Biblical reference works–different translations of the Bible, a concordance, Nave’s topical Bible, some Bible atlases, an interlinear Bible with Greek and Hebrew as well as English. An end table cupboard held all of our children’s picture books–when they weren’t spilled out around the house.

Dad has never been much of a reader, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t see him read. In fact, if I was up early enough to see Dad before he left for work, I’d always see him reading. He’d sit at the kitchen table, munching on his cereal and reading the Bible.

Dad was also a big fan of reference works. Often, we’d get into a discussion at the dinner table that would end with the injunction to “look it up”. We’d dutifully go and get whichever reference work was appropriate and look it up. We kids gravitated toward the glossy-paged, full color Comptons when we looked things up, but Dad often made us get out the Britannica to look things up too.

I’m running out of time and have to get to work…but I still have plenty more to say–so I’ll probably end up with a Flashback part 2 this afternoon/evening.