It's the last day of 2009 and I'm still considering the question I asked last week:  What characteristic of Christ would I most like incorporated into my life this next year? (or something like that).

A number of thoughts keep coming back to me, one of which is this idea of needing to become as a child in order to enter the Place where God Rules (His Kingdom).  And the characteristic of a child that keeps coming back to me in various ways is that of playfulness. 

I don't think of myself as playful but there are times I discover it is in me.  Like last evening six-year old grandson and his four-year-old brother were in our bedroom while I was changing and the oldest, Isaac, said that the design on the ceiling looked like swirls of spaghetti. So I danced along with that idea and said that Velma and I lay in bed at night and I have a long fork that I use to reach up and get the spaghetti and she does, too, but since the handles are so long we can't feed ourselves so we have to feed each other.  (This was done with all the motions.) 

That is a kind of playfulness, the imaginative, pretend kind, which comes easier for me than other kinds.  I still have the picture in my mind of my father doing a pretend thing that had to do with a doll and a wastebasket with our oldest child when she was around four or five.  I think I'm a little chip off the old (sorry 'bout that "old" part, Dad) block.

Velma's expressions of fun came through her family playing games.  Just the other night the siblings celebrated their father's 89th birthday, and did it by reminiscing about things that reminded them of their father.  Just about all of the memories had to do with some sort of game-playing, a good share of it being the practical joke variety. 

Pegge Bernecker in the January issue of Listen: A Seeker's Resource for Spiritual Direction writes "Play awakens and engages our sensuality and sexuality. Playful activities create
the glue for mutual, innovative endeavors and meaningful
relationships. An antidote to suffering, play is healing and
restorative. At its essence, play is free, dissolves conflict, and builds connections. Life-giving, play leads us to appreciation and gratefulness."

I'm afraid many of us grew up with the idea that being merry is directly connected to our depravity, especially since there is a lot of Scripture where people being merry indicated their disdain for the truly important things in life and was a spiritually dangerous place for them, somewhat because it involved too much alcohol. 

But let's not forget that the father in the story of his son returning to him after wasting his resources threw a party and invited everyone to be merry.  Ultimately, perhaps, the freedom to be merry, to have genuine fun, is a celebration of God's abundant grace and of the reality that nothing good that God gives can be earned, and so we are free to be as a child who fully trusts his or her parents to take care of the big things of life while we enjoy learning to take our place as dearly loved and enjoyed children.

So, is life serious? You bet it is!  Our choices make a huge difference in how we experience life.  Is God serious?  You bet!  God is serious about taking the pressure off of us to have to earn what is good, and God is serious about drawing us into the dance of freedom, where, by being connected to Him as the Source of life we know we have everything we need and are able to give to the world out of that abundance.

I will be very happy if this year is one of enjoying playfulness more fully.  If that happens I will enjoy myself, God, and you more fully also, and that sounds a bit like love!

"God, some of the enjoyment I receive in relationships has something to do with the sense of playfulness in them, and I would like more of that, with others, with You.  In order to do that, though, I need to stop worrying about whether I am getting the dance steps right and just surrender to the Dance of Love and Freedom that You are.  I know much more about working on the steps than I do about that sort of surrender, so I want to be more tuned in to the invitations. I trust that You want to help me with this.  So be it."

 I work with individuals, couples, and families to identify the ways of life and death in their lives and help uncover the motivation to choose that which leads to life, whether it be through counseling or spiritual direction.  - Sheldon Swartz, MA/LMFT