“A family that plays together stays together.” As you look into your family’s future, do you see them staying together? Do they enjoy being together? What are you doing to preserve your family’s unity? The only way for relationships to grow is to spend time together. What better way to spend time together than around a ping pong table. I believe that a ping pong table would lead to family unity.

My family works well together. This past summer there were three or four trees on the avenue of the driveway with limbs growing so low that they hindered mowing the grass around them. To fix the problem Mom called for a family work day. Dad worked the chainsaw, I loaded the severed limbs into the trailer, my brother, Matthew, drove the trailer to the back field and unloaded, my sister, Emily, raked the leaves and small twigs, and Mom supervised and organized it all. We worked so quickly and efficiently that day that it only took half the time expected.
I believe that because my family works well together we will play well together, too. Two Christmases ago my family received an air hockey table. This fun, compact game provided a way for the whole family to spend time together inside, a luxury we did not have before. We would hold tournaments almost daily, including my 9-year-old sister. We all enjoyed playing, but as Emily grew older we outgrew the simplicity of a two-dimensional game. A ping pong table requires much more involved playing and would better suit my family now.

But air hokey isn’t the only game we have mastered as a family. Last fall my family went on vacation with my grandparents in a huge house in the mountain of Tennessee. Unfortunately the weather that weekend was much less than satisfactory, and required us to stay inside most of the day. Downstairs there was a ping pong table, and though only Dad had played before, we all began to play often every day. Everyone soon began to enjoy playing and we started having nightly ping pong tournaments to pass the time during the bad weather. The ping pong table brought us together that weekend, so why shouldn’t we have one in our own house to enjoy on a daily basis?

Playing game after game of ping pong in our family room would surely bring light-hearted competition and loads of laughter, and would create a sense of togetherness. Just as we work together to accomplish a common goal, my family could play together to accomplish a different kind of goal—family unity.
As I look into my family’s future, I see us spending lots of time together and enjoying it.