It’s no big secret that I enjoy participating in The Contemporary Chorale. It’s challenging, exciting, . . . and fun. Last week I was working on a project for our chorale. It has lots of tiny details that need to be right or it absolutely will not work. I had never done anything like this before, and I wasn’t even sure I could do it. It was stressful. It was painstaking. It was tedious. . .but it was fun. It was fun because when I pushed myself to do something I didn’t know I could do, and it actually worked, I took delight in what I did. 

There’s something to be said for the kind of fun that looks an awful lot like hard work. I’ve seen it in kids that I’ve taught, when we set our expectations higher than they thought they could achieve and helped them achieve it, they thought it was fun. Not during the process. Oh, they griped. They said it was “too hard”. Or “boring”. But at the end of it all, they said it was “fun”. 

I cringe when I see “fun” as an adjective for things, especially where kids are involved. Often the mindset is fun=entertained. There are plenty of times and places where that is absolutely the perfect thing. Like Disney World. fun = entertainment. One place where this should not be the case — the church. We are teaching children that it’s perfectly OK to set aside their right and privilege to work hard, to think, and to push themselves. Then we wonder why they “grow up” and have no idea how to think for themselves. 

A challenge for myself is, as far as I’m able, to help the kids I encounter to redefine “fun”, while still keeping room for well-placed fun.