The Gift of Play

We created our own little oasis in the backyard yesterday.  We blew up the inflatable swimming pool, plopped it beneath our plastic slide, and added the garden sprinkler for an extra dose of splash. What else is a woman to do with four restless children when the heat index is hovering around one hundred and ten degrees?

Silver droplets streaked Hannah’s tanned face as she stretched her sun-kissed body across a hot pink water ring and bobbed atop the garden-hose-induced waves in lazy contentedness. She closed her eyes and soaked up the sun while I swatted at the sweat beads congregating on my forehead. I set my book down and leaned over the pool’s edge. I cupped my palms and let the wet refreshment dribble through my fingers. My toes begged my elbows to join them. I abandoned my lawn chair and slipped waist deep into the humble waters.  Joshua giggled at the sight. Hannah opened one eye and flashed me a brilliant grin. I turned my hands into a bowl of fingers and gathered thousands of liquid pearls.  A scoop. A splash. A water fight.

In his brilliant book The Rest of God, Pastor and author Mark Buchanan speculates, “Of all the things Jesus meant when he exhorted his disciples to be childlike, few dare to suggest he wanted them to play more. But maybe he did. Maybe all the other virtues of childhood–trust, humility, simplicity, innocence, wonder- are not separate from a life of playfulness, but the fruit of it: that apart form cartwheels and kite flying, leapfrog and hide-and-seek, snakes and-ladders and digging for buried treasure, all those other things wither.”