Playfulness

I wanted to share another great section from "Dangerous Wonder" by Michael Yaconelli:

Time for a reality check, right? Playfulness is not a welcome idea for most of us. It sounds frivolous and shallow, distracting and irrelevant, inefficient and unproductive. That's because we live in a technological culture that worships busyness and activity. Under the guise of saving time, we now are inundated with e-mail, pagers, and cellular phones. We end each day smothered by the demands of our time and are greeted each new morn with more to do, not less. Play? There's no time to play. How can we play when the mountain of work and problems we are faced with each day get higher and deeper? How can we play when the world is overcome with poverty, famine, and war?

Play is an expression of God's presence in the world; one clear sign of God's absence in society is the absence of playfulness and laughter. Play is an escape; it is the way to release the life-smothering grip of busyness, stress, and anxiety. (Playfulness is a modern expression of hope, a celebration of the flickering light of the gospel that plays with the dark by pouncing on the surrounding darkness like a cat toying with a mouse.)