Fun and Games

I had a lot of fun playing games by myself and with my sister as a kid. It was so much fun just going out in the front yard and playing Indians. (We never bothered with cowboys; we both wanted to be Indians/Native Americans, anyway.) All you needed to entertain yourself was your surroundings and your imagination.

I could go on a tangent about how kids these days don't play outside enough, and how we're slowly becoming zombie slaves to electronic entertainment, but that's not the point of this post. As tempting as that tangent is.

What I'd actually like to talk about is one of the games I used to play when I was sitting by myself anywhere. Looking around me, I would try to come up with analogies to connect what I saw with some aspect of God or our interaction with God. For example, a pillow; we find our rest and comfort in God. Hardwood floor; Christ is the solid foundation we can build our lives on. If I couldn't come up with anything, I could always just say, "God created it."

Somewhere along the way, I stopped playing that game, and it's one I wish I'd kept up with. I still know in my head that everything connects back to God in some way or another, but there's something about actually making those connections for fun that helps it sink in better. When you constantly see things reflecting God, it's easy to stay in constant worship and it's hard to focus inward on yourself.

Formal education seems to be the typical scapegoat for loss of creativity, imagination, and pure thought. I'm very grateful for my education, but it's true that being bogged down with schoolwork is not the best thing for cultivating a fluid, individual worldview. My mind grew at a decent pace, but the spirit I had as a child? Its growth slowed.

The Apostle Paul wrote this to the church in Corinth: "When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways." In my mind, this connects to something Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote in his first philosophical work: "My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.)"

We all have to climb ladders to reach the next level of maturity in understanding. But the thing about throwing away that ladder once you've reached the destination is to not forget the climb. If you forget what you learned, you're back where you started. I forgot how to see the world like a child who thinks God is awesome and everywhere, and now I'm trying to play catch up. And, God willing, I will catch up.

We grow out of the games we play as children, but the games have meaning. If we forget those, did we really grow up?