Better than a sermon ... when God plays with us

the monthly letter

I've started this new thing: I ride in the car in silence. Not a lot, but sometimes.

Harkening back to the days when cell phones were “car phones” coiled into big black boxes, and when I was tired of radio ads or my mix tapes … perhaps I should say I'm reviving an old, previously-familiar practice of silence.

Remember that? Waiting in line at the grocery store or the lobby at the doctor's office with just your thoughts. Sitting at the restaurant table when your friend got up to go to the bathroom — just thinking.

Staring off into space feels like a luxury these days.

Well, a few Saturdays ago, I drove home from my pilates class without a podcast or Voxer or a conversation with my mom piping through my car. Just my thoughts. This practice — once normal but now counter-cultural — leaves me expecting that the silence holds something for me.

Some days I notice I'm more afraid, more tired, and more defenseless than I realized, and this noticing becomes a conversation with God.

And other days, I see God.

Sounds poetically hyperbolic to say I see God, but I've started to wonder if, in these loud days, God is bending lower to meet us … making Himself more accessible to our attention-starved minutes.

Driving a four-lane stretch of road home this particular Saturday, the sky was cerulean, unbroken by clouds. Like a school photo backdrop, everything shows up against this blue. I noticed two butterflies, framed, flitting across my windshield, and I remembered that many monarchs migrate through Kansas City during this time of year.

Before I had time to think about these two (because remember, it was just me and my thoughts in the car), a few more crossed my windshield. Now, I was watching for them. Higher in the sky, mimicking gulls as if they were flying in formation, came ones and twos, then threes, above me.

Cars were racing at 55 and 60 miles per hour beside me, and there was a sky show. Had I not been looking, I would have confused the distance and thought the butterflies to be birds. I was delightfully distracted by this moment that would have no impact upon my schedule, priorities, or task list … but … would it?

Since I wrote to you about watchfulness in August (and lived that watchfulness in August), I've noticed a handful of new things in my life, that one butterfly would have felt like a whisper of assurance from God — He makes things new (Rev 21:5).

But He sent me dozens of butterflies. And more dozens.

And something about this interruption to my typical Saturday made me feel seen … again. It wasn't a sermon in the sky — a list of steps to take next in this season of my life — but a butterfly, a parade of butterflies.

God was playful with me.

One of the key principles Nate and I learned as we have undergone our back-door education on childhood trauma (walking alongside our kids who experienced it before they came to us) is the power that “play” has to cushion a heart.

Years ago, during some of our most intense times, a practitioner's advice to us was: play with your children. Yes, they were big – not tiny – but they needed more play to heal. And we watched hearts unfurl over family fishbowl, bike rides, and CatchPhrase. Things that all feel natural to do when we're in a playful mood or a playful season but which feel tough when life presses. Some days I was so tired from the intensity of our lives that the last thing I wanted to do was … play.

But I watched it have its work.

Friends, this concept is God's. Counter-intuitive, He meets us as He plays with us. He reaches into our child-heart with … playfulness. His ask of us to become like little children (in Matthew 18:1-3) has color. Children squeal, and they laugh without covering their mouths. They tumble and tickle and love to be chased. My little ones own only a few pairs of pants that don’t have holes after three wears — children don’t walk, they climb and crawl and roll.

And Jesus, He doesn't just play with them. He plays with us. Jesus just about passed His disciples on the water  -- "He meant to pass by them" (Mark 6:48) – what? A bit of hide and seek, perhaps. In a story we know so well, a detail we may have overlooked. He sent Simon Peter on a hunt for coins in a fish's mouth – that was His sermon. He play-acted on the road to Emmaus after His death – pretending to be curious and ignorant … “huh, you don't say?”

We choose to play when we feel playful, but part of our growth during the non-playful, more focused and intense times, may also need to include welcoming this side of God. We expect Him to sermonize us through our hard times (and we do the same for ourselves and our friends and our children) when sometimes — many times — He plays with us instead. He reaches our heart through a tickle, not a lecture.

One of my younger ones has hit a tough stretch – lots of emotion as she feels lost in the swirl of seven hearts needing attention. Her request, near daily, is "push me high on the swing!" Sometimes our littlest ones, not yet tainted by the world's creep, reveal the heart of God most clearly. As a mom, I have a non-thinking pull to coach, to teach, to train. But this one … she reminds me that sometimes the biggest need is to feel the thrill of the wind in her lungs and my hands there to push her higher.

What a strange thing to consider: God as playful. But open-handed receiving from God — the playfulness that comes when we create space and ask Him to increase our wonder — it may be the antidote we need against the intensity of these days.

Consider today: sitting in silence in the car with watchful eyes, finding a playground and pumping your legs — asking God to hold your child-heart, visiting the arboretum or the apple orchard — asking God to meet you there.

Put yourself on the swing. Ask God to show His playfulness to your heart that needs it more than you know.

For those of you, like me, who are starting to see just how much a parade of monarchs might be God's necessary disruption to your intensity: two times a year, we deeply discount SOAR, my private writing space, where I write deeper and more candid about topics like this. This week is one of those times. You can find out more here.

Until next time,

Sara