Why recreation?

Hey everyone, 

Have you ever taken a bite of a decadent dessert and loved it so much that you just wanted to share it with everyone?!  That is precisely how I feel about recreation and leisure, so I started this blog to share some neat things I have learned.

My name is Andrew.  I have been happily married to Mrs. Right for three and a half years and our sweet, little "Scooter" has been bringing us lots of joy.  I'm a graduate student studying Youth and Family Recreation at Brigham Young University with aspirations to do a doctorate degree and become a professor of Recreation and Leisure.  I'm learning so many new things each day about how important it is for our families to be intentional about recreation and leisure and I want to share them with the world!  So I decided to make a blog and post once a week or so about new things I'm learning or have learned.  I hope that you'll read, enjoy, and apply the things I write about.  I strongly believe that wholesome family recreation can help our families become stronger and happier family units.  So here we go!

For my first post I wanted to start with The Family: A Proclamation To The World.  Satan has always attacked what is most precious, namely the family.  In 1995, the leaders of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the First Presidency and Quorum of the Twelve--who I believe to be the Lord's chosen servants--released a statement about the family.  It gives a lot of beautiful and oft needed counsel on marriage and family, but the sentence I would like to focus on says, "Successful marriages and families [and individuals] are established and maintained on principles of faith, prayer, repentance, forgiveness, respect, love, compassion, work, and wholesome recreational activities."  Recreation is important enough to make it into a statement released by the prophet and apostles!  How neat is that!?

Now, recreation and leisure isn't just for families.  It's for everyone!  Young, old, male, female, whoever you may be, we all participate in some kind of leisure.  I have a strong belief and testimony that wholesome recreational activities are important for families.  There are a plethora of benefits we can receive from recreation and leisure, many of which we will discuss in the upcoming weeks!  Although recreation seems like something everyone just does, there is so much more we can do to be intentional about our leisure time.  I promise that as we are more intentional about recreation and leisure in our families they will grow stronger, closer, and happier. 

My next post will explore the meaning behind the name of the blog as we look at the book The Intentional Family by William Doherty.