The Spirituality of Playing
(Note: This is something that I wrote in 2002. It seems very fitting for where I am now in 2007.)
Each of us is always in such a hurry to grow up. When we are five, we can’t wait until we are six. When we are half-way through our sixth year, we are suddenly “six and a HALF!” and we don’t let anyone forget it! When we turn 8 or so we start to pick up baseball gloves and footballs and suddenly play has to have rules and comparisons, what is right or wrong, legal or illegal, which player is better, who’s the best on the team, who’s the last one to be picked. Play becomes serious business. At age twelve, play is reserved only for sports. The Barbies and the G.I. Joes and the Legos are all hidden away in the attic or worse…sold off as a grab bag at a garage sale for a dollar. Next come the teenage years where there is no play because everything is so serious and so much about life and death. “If Bobby Jones finds out I have a crush on him, I will just DIE!” Play is forgotten or focused on sports, choirs, school, or plays. We think we have the world figured out and then tragedy strikes: we graduate.
In college, we remember how to play for just a little while. The introduction of new freedom takes us back to when we were able to ride our first bicycle. There is no curfew, no watchdog, no guidepost, and no security blanket for our lives any more. We are finally adults, standing on our own, making our own decisions, making our first mistakes without the comfort of family. We find help in the arms of people who were strangers last semester, but after a few months of Introduction to Chemistry and slaving over the Periodic Table together, they have become the sibling we never knew we had. However, we never play together. We are too busy studying, working, chasing people of the opposite gender, and worrying about life after graduation.
And, before we know it, we’re there. We are living on our own far from home…even if it is just a few miles away. We come “home” to an empty apartment and turn on the television so that we have something to talk about at work the next day. All the while wanting nothing more than to change out of our “work clothes” and into our “play clothes,” to jump on our bicycle, ride around the neighborhood, and have adventures like we did before.
Some will become adrenaline junkies, pushing themselves to the outer limits of human tolerances. Adrenaline is a fickle mistress. As with any kind of junkie, the desire for more will eventually burn them up. The lengths to which we will go in order to play!
Of course, we think that God is not in our playing. We remember from 1 Corinthians 13 how that works: “When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; but now that I am a man, I put childish ways behind me.” The spiritual life is no place for a child. It is a grown up world of reason and thought and discussion and conversation with scholars and pedigreed people who have paid more money than we have so that they can prove that they know more than we do.
Or is it simply that they have forgotten more than we have? Have they forgotten how to play? I have never known joy to be an intellectual pursuit…it’s always been a feeling in my heart. I have never known joy to come from a book. I have experienced humor, laughter, insight, and many other positive things from a book, but never have I known joy. Joy comes from experience. Joy comes from living. Paul was able to write from prison, “Rejoice in the Lord always! Again, I say, rejoice!” Joy comes from a relationship, not a process.
Play is a new spiritual discipline. It takes effort to shut off everything and play… with God, with kids, with pets, with ourselves (not that way). To take some time to be active in accomplishing nothing but living the fancies and fantasies of God, listening for the evidences of his love, takes discipline in this task oriented, highly effective world. The spiritual discipline of play is waiting for Him to come to the houses of our grown-up lives in his muddy T-shirt, blue jeans with holes in the knees, and last year’s tennis shoes, and say, “Can Tommy come out to play?”
Of course I can Jesus. Let me change my clothes first.
Each of us is always in such a hurry to grow up. When we are five, we can’t wait until we are six. When we are half-way through our sixth year, we are suddenly “six and a HALF!” and we don’t let anyone forget it! When we turn 8 or so we start to pick up baseball gloves and footballs and suddenly play has to have rules and comparisons, what is right or wrong, legal or illegal, which player is better, who’s the best on the team, who’s the last one to be picked. Play becomes serious business. At age twelve, play is reserved only for sports. The Barbies and the G.I. Joes and the Legos are all hidden away in the attic or worse…sold off as a grab bag at a garage sale for a dollar. Next come the teenage years where there is no play because everything is so serious and so much about life and death. “If Bobby Jones finds out I have a crush on him, I will just DIE!” Play is forgotten or focused on sports, choirs, school, or plays. We think we have the world figured out and then tragedy strikes: we graduate.
In college, we remember how to play for just a little while. The introduction of new freedom takes us back to when we were able to ride our first bicycle. There is no curfew, no watchdog, no guidepost, and no security blanket for our lives any more. We are finally adults, standing on our own, making our own decisions, making our first mistakes without the comfort of family. We find help in the arms of people who were strangers last semester, but after a few months of Introduction to Chemistry and slaving over the Periodic Table together, they have become the sibling we never knew we had. However, we never play together. We are too busy studying, working, chasing people of the opposite gender, and worrying about life after graduation.
And, before we know it, we’re there. We are living on our own far from home…even if it is just a few miles away. We come “home” to an empty apartment and turn on the television so that we have something to talk about at work the next day. All the while wanting nothing more than to change out of our “work clothes” and into our “play clothes,” to jump on our bicycle, ride around the neighborhood, and have adventures like we did before.
Some will become adrenaline junkies, pushing themselves to the outer limits of human tolerances. Adrenaline is a fickle mistress. As with any kind of junkie, the desire for more will eventually burn them up. The lengths to which we will go in order to play!
Of course, we think that God is not in our playing. We remember from 1 Corinthians 13 how that works: “When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; but now that I am a man, I put childish ways behind me.” The spiritual life is no place for a child. It is a grown up world of reason and thought and discussion and conversation with scholars and pedigreed people who have paid more money than we have so that they can prove that they know more than we do.
Or is it simply that they have forgotten more than we have? Have they forgotten how to play? I have never known joy to be an intellectual pursuit…it’s always been a feeling in my heart. I have never known joy to come from a book. I have experienced humor, laughter, insight, and many other positive things from a book, but never have I known joy. Joy comes from experience. Joy comes from living. Paul was able to write from prison, “Rejoice in the Lord always! Again, I say, rejoice!” Joy comes from a relationship, not a process.
Play is a new spiritual discipline. It takes effort to shut off everything and play… with God, with kids, with pets, with ourselves (not that way). To take some time to be active in accomplishing nothing but living the fancies and fantasies of God, listening for the evidences of his love, takes discipline in this task oriented, highly effective world. The spiritual discipline of play is waiting for Him to come to the houses of our grown-up lives in his muddy T-shirt, blue jeans with holes in the knees, and last year’s tennis shoes, and say, “Can Tommy come out to play?”
Of course I can Jesus. Let me change my clothes first.