Family Home Evening (FHE)

The Backstory (ie: the explanation, ie: the girl version [for the summation, ie: the guy version, skip to Couples Night]):
As a young adult, while still living at home, my older brothers and I would host Sunday evening sing-alongs (for lack of a better name) in our back yard. Most Sunday evenings there would be a church sponsored fireside for young adults ages 18 to 30. A fireside is basically just a devotional were you sit and listen to a speaker talk on a spiritual or developmental topic. Sometimes they are more interactive and sometimes not. It depends on the speaker.

Anyway, after this fireside we would invite friends over for, basically, an after-fireside-fireside. We would actually have a fire though. :D  We would sit around and socialize and sing hymns. Our friends would often invite their friends and it was a way to meet new people and socialize in a more intimate setting. In fact, it was at one of these sing-alongs that I met my first girlfriend.

So why did my brothers and I host such an activity? I remember before we were doing this at our house we would go over to another friends house Sunday evenings and do a similar thing. Mostly it was just to hang out and socialize. We did not see one another enough during the week and at the hour long church fireside we did not do much socializing because we were busy listening to the speaker. So this was a way to spend time together and visit.

Some in our group of friends were musically talented. They would strum their guitars or play the keyboard. One such friend would sing songs she wrote and rehearse amusing childhood stories.

Well, that group and that location just seemed to fizzle out. I am not really sure how or when, just that it did, and a few years went by. So not by any grand plan or goal we started inviting people over to our house after firesides and slowly it got more constant and the group got bigger. We would tell stories and muse, but after a while the evenings started to center around singing hymns. We kept a stack of hymn books and again we found a guitar player within our group, and every now and then a piano player, and we would sit in our back yard around a small fire and sing the evening away.

They were some good times. I think part of the reason we did it too was because we in my family are somewhat natural party planners. We come from a large family and our parents would often be involved in coordinating church or scout or school activities so it is just something we grew up observing and in some of us it stuck. It stuck in me anyway. I enjoy hosting parties and coordinating events. It is not something that often comes easy for people but I have always seemed to enjoy bringing people together.

Couples Night:
Bee and I have several couple friends here in our church congregation that we enjoy spending time with. However, there never seems to be enough opportunity to spend time together and during the hours we are at church together we are busy listening or teaching and we do not have much time to chat.

I decided since we have a small fire pit it would be fun to invite some of our friends from church over to have a Family Home Evening together. We would sit and converse, and sing hymns, have a quick spiritual thought and enjoy s'mores together. And that is exactly what we did. Not all of those we invited were able to make it the other evening but we all still had a wonderful time, at least, I know I did. I really enjoy people, friends most especially.

Thanks to those who were able to make it and for those that missed out this time I hope we can do it again some other time and have you there. We love you all!