We have no problem understanding that kids need to have fun and so we do everything we can to foster that in them. We buy them great toys and take them on great adventures. We enroll them in clubs and get them on teams. We encourage their imagination and give them hours to just go outside and play. We do it because we want them to have fun. Fun is a value to us for our kids. But how about for us?
What is your relationship with fun? Do you give yourself time and space for fun? Or do you feel, like I felt for so long—that as an adult, spending time just having fun is…well…indulgent?!
I’m not sure when I decided to stop having fun. I don’t think it was an actual decision, like one morning I woke up and said, “I’m a woman now, all the fun years are behind me. Time to be boring and responsible and utterly practical.” No, I think my fun death was a slow one—like the death of a starving man in the wilderness.
It probably started when in my early teens I caught the achievement bug. Not sure who I got it from, but I got it and I got it bad! I became unknowingly thoroughly convinced that my worth was utterly tied up in how well I did at…well everything!
When the achievement bug got me, many systems began to shut down: the rest system, the emotional health system; but I’m fairly certain the fun system was one of the first ones to go. There simply wasn’t time for fun anymore. If I was going to get the best grades, I needed to focus on my studies. If I was going to get into the right college, I needed to start working on my resume NOW.
And then the achievement bug strangled the fun out of those things that once had been. Sports for the joy of it became sports for the varsity letter or sports for the right dress size. Before I knew it, much of the fun had flown by the wayside. It may have been allowed to creep in every now and then, but it needed to know its place—in the back seat!
I’d like to say the achievement bug was the only murderer of the fun in my life, but that would be a lie. Honestly, when I became a Christian one of the messages I misheard was that life was supposed to be hard—that if we really wanted to be faithful we needed to be like the disciples—enduring ridicule, public beatings, even martyrdom.
If we were having fun, we clearly weren’t focused on the mission Jesus sent us on to “Go into the world and make disciples of all nations” (Matthew 28:19a). If we were having fun then we certainly couldn’t be ‘denying ourselves, taking up our crosses, and following Jesus’ (Luke 9:23).
No, clearly there was to be no fun in following Christ!
Of course, I never would have said these things out loud. After all, who in their right mind would want to be a Christian if they thought it required a voluntary sacrifice of all fun?! But I lived it. And I lived it hard! Do you know when you know you have believed this lie that fun is indulgent? It’s when someone asks you, “what are your hobbies” (another way of saying: “what do you like to do for fun?”) and your only response is to look at them cock-eyed, like “what do you mean by ‘hobby?’”
I’ve recently been devouring a bunch of Brene’ Brown’s writing. It’s pretty much been wrecking me. And the first book I read? The Gifts of Imperfection. Perfect book for someone with a 20+ year case of the achievement bug, right?! I already knew I was going to die when I hit the chapter: “Cultivating Play and Rest.” Play and rest? Who has time for either of those?! But wanting to make Brene proud, I’ve been working on being vulnerable and courageous, so I bravely began reading.
Well, if “fun” seemed like a dirty word to me, you can only imagine the shivers that this word “play” sent down my spine!
Play is by its very definition purposeless. It is having fun for the sake of having fun. It is not play if it accomplishes something or achieves something. Ok, can anyone see my head exploding at this point?! How in the world could you expect me to take time away from all of the “meaningful, productive” things in my life for the sake of something utterly meaningless?!
But here’s the deal. Play, FUN, is NOT meaningless. It is actually very meaningful. In her chapter, Brene’ Brown talks about research Dr. Stuart Brown did on the topic of play. And get this result:
“Drawing on his own research, as well as the latest advances in biology, psychology and neurology, Brown explains that play shapes our brain, helps us foster empathy, helps us navigate complex social groups, and is at the core of creativity and innovation” (p. 100). He goes on to say that ‘the opposite of play is not work. The opposite of play is depression…. In the long run work does not work without play’” (Brown, p. 101).
Let us just do a little silent pause right here. That’s what I had to do when I read this. In fact, days later that was STILL what I was doing as I took this in. I feel like I have wasted so much of my life doing everything I could to push away fun—to push away play. And now I am learning that this value on learning, this insistence on going hard, this push to give it all away was inadvertently sabotaging my ability to have the impact I so wanted to have.
I thought fun wasn’t a worthy value because fun wasn’t in the Bible. I didn’t read a verse: “though shalt play,” so fun must not have been a priority to God. But stepping back and taking in this research; and evaluating how hard it is for me to rest, to do anything truly and solely for myself, I see it was there all along. In Matthew 18:3 Jesus says:
“Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 18:3 NIV)
I always used to think that this meant we needed to have child-like faith—faith with no doubts. But I now think it means a lot more.
A year ago, I was in the car with my kids and we were talking about our bodies in heaven. I was telling them that we would have new bodies in heaven, but that people would be able to recognize us. One of my sons said something to the effect of:
“I think we will have our kid bodies, because that’s when we are most fully alive.”
WOW! Quite a thought for an 9-year-old! At the time I thought, “maybe he’s right! After all, when are we as healthy as we are as kids?” But thinking about this statement by Jesus, it is making me think deeper about what it means to “change and become like little children.” And I think maybe this is about more than faith, more than physical fitness. Perhaps this is about our hearts—hearts full of reckless abandon; hearts full of curiosity and wonder; hearts full of FUN!
Guys, this is one I’m still working on. I know I have a lot to dig out of to get there, but I do believe that it truly is a lie that fun is indulgent. I believe God made us to have fun. He made us to play. He did this because He wants us to have empathy; He wants us to be able to navigate tricky relationships, He wants us to be the most creative human beings on the planet. But most of all, He wants us to have fun because He loves us and when we have fun, we are like those fully alive children who will be first in His Kingdom. So, with that said, I think it’s time to go outside and play!