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Christians can engage in whimsy not because life is easy, but because life is difficult.
In the early 1980s, my grandfather was diagnosed with a brain tumor. The surgeons told my grandparents that they were confident in their skill, but it was still brain surgery (in the early 80s!) and not without risk. Still, if he didn’t have the procedure, he would lose his eyesight.
The night before he went under the knife, his nurses were surprised to hear music coming from his hospital room. His four adult children had driven from far and wide and gathered with their mother by his bedside. Instead of worrying or weeping, they were singing hymns.
Were they nervous? Of course. But on the eve of what could be their last morning together, they chose to express their love through play. There were tears, but there was also the joy of voices lifted together—the very same voices that had been blending since my grandparents first set their tots around the piano decades earlier. My grandfather has always espoused the words of one of my favorite hymns: “Heart of my own heart, whatever befall / Still be my vision, O ruler of all.”
I wasn’t at that bedside; I hadn’t even been born yet. But the story has echoed down through our family for decades and changed the way we live, even on the cusp of potential tragedy.
While the influence of play can scarcely be overstated, its importance is commonly overlooked. We are often far too focused on completing the necessary tasks of life to spend time pursuing frivolity. Put another way, who has time to play when the challenges facing us are so very, very serious?
As Thomas Hobbes famously wrote, life can be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Scripture describes our lives as fading as quickly as “the flowers of the field” (1 Pet. ...
from Christianity Today Magazine
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