I read this last night and thought I'd share. It's from an interview with Stanley Hauerwas entitled "Christianity, it's not a relition: it's an adventure" from The Hauerwas Reader.

"What we do when we educate kids to be happy and self-fulfilled is to absolutely ruin them. Parents should say to their kids, “What you want out of life is not happiness but to be part of a worthy adventure. You want to have something worth dying for.” It’s awful when all we have to live for is ourselves; that’s what the Gospel reveals to us. The Good News tells of the adventure that humans have been made part of through God’s grace, through Christ, and through the church. God made each Christian part of God’s sacrificial life so that the world might know what it is not abandoned and that there is salvation. That’s who Christians are. Doesn’t that sound like a joyful thing? I use the language of joy because happiness is just too pale to describe this adventure.

Christianity is the proclamation that God gives Christians a gift that they don’t know they need. The gift then transforms their lives so that they are trained to want the right things rightly. Christmas has absolutely destroyed this understanding of the Good News. It’s trained people to believe that Christianity is fundamentally about giving and receiving and that our happiness is in giving and getting what we want. But, in fact, the best Christmases are often the ones in which one doesn’t get what one wants.

Remember when you got a chemistry set rather than a bicycle and you thought, “I hate this thing.” But one wintry day you started playing with the chemistry set and
discovered that it was really interesting. Suddenly you were trained to have wants you didn’t know you should have. That’s what Christianity is all about: it’s an adventure we didn’t know we wanted to be on."

I'm afraid this is a lot more radical than it at first appears.