Maybe We Need to Have Fun

(Originally posted on my old blog in November 2015)

I did a study on personalities recently, and people with the personality type that best matched mine supposedly “have trouble focusing on boring things.”

Oh HAHAHAH I don’t relate to that at all it’s just exactly what my problem is every single day. I swear to you, I cannot clean and cook within the same week or my soul shrivels up and dies. It’s either a cleaning week or a cooking week and no matter how many tricks I try, this is how it must be if I am to stay nice and pretty and humble.

Even though we have been together for quite some time, Husband Luke is not as aware of my personality “quirks” as one might expect. Bimonthly he insists on educating me about four wheel drive, and I swear I CANNOT LISTEN. He just says “blah blah blah” or whatever (don’t really know, not listening) and then gets sad when he quizzes me after and I cannot relay any of the essential information. I feel kind of bad about it, but WHY IS HE TRYING TO KILL MY SOUL? Adelaide was playing with a toy car that said, “4WD” on it, and Luke was explaining to her (even though she is 19 months old and only cares about cats and crackers) that this means four wheel drive, a.k.a., his favorite topic to talk about especially with people who don’t care. Of course I thought “4WD” meant “forward” in cute texting lingo, and when I shared this information with Luke, he stabbed a fork in his eye and ran away from home.

Now that my two bebes keep me nailed to the house with their adorable little figurative hammers while Fork Eye is away at work all day, my compulsive need for fun stuff has gotten very out of control and is possibly making me crazy. So I fixate on odd tasks like making their donut and milk Halloween costumes, and then my conscience is like, “How did you find time to do that but every item of clothing in the house is dirty?” and I’m like “hey Conscience, you know if you talk to me about laundry I will forget to pay attention,” and then she's like blah blah blah or whatever. I don’t feel too badly about it because creativity is soul food, and souls need to eat. I want my soul to be nice and fat.

I think too many of us have skinny souls. I think we forget to have fun, or we feel guilty about having fun, or we care too much about being cool to have fun. Or we get confused and think fun is best served in a red solo cup, and the plastic cup becomes a crutch. 

You know, God invented laughing and dancing and singing, and I think He wants us to do that stuff. I wonder if He’s annoyed that His people keep forgetting that He came up with fun in the first place. I’ve heard it said that the heart of worship is joy—so I suppose we should probably be joyful, and I suppose that a life of joyful worship may require bit of fun here and there. Or maybe even a lot. 

I always tell high school students that I don’t think loving Jesus means staying home with their theoretical cats on Friday nights while all their peers have the red solo cup kind of fun. Shouldn't we, who know that plastic cups do not hold the joy we all crave, show the way to that joy? If the most creative of all creatives is our God, if the inventor of laughter is the one we pray to, shouldn’t we be having more fun than anyone else? Shouldn’t we be drawing people in with our smiles and parties and sense of humor rather than alienating them with aggressive Facebook statuses? Was God kidding when he said, “A cheerful heart is good medicine” (Prov. 17:22)? 

I mean, I think we can all agree that the world is hurting. Maybe the world needs medicine—cheerful hearts. We can help give that by spreading a little more fun around—real fun, not some kind of churchified version of it. We need laughing, dancing, singing, parties—that’s the stuff that cheers up a heart. The world needs that kind of medicine. And also, like, a spoonful of sugar, which is usually mentioned in conjunction with medicine. Helps it go down and whatnot. Unless that messes up my metaphor. But also, yeah, probably sugar will help, too.