Cybercolumn by Berry D. Simpson: Playing along

osted: 8/31/07

CYBER COLUMN:
Playing along

My young friend Jonathan started kindergarten this year. He was so excited; he wore his new backpack around the house, with his new lunchbox and school supplies inside, for days and days. And he wore his new school shoes, which he wasn’t allowed to wear outside the house but could wear inside, even with his pajamas. The young man had no idea what school would be like, but he was ready to get started. He didn’t know what it was, but he was ready.

When I heard this story about Jonathan, I wondered if his sense of anticipation and joy is what Jesus meant when he said we should love him like a child. Matthew 18:4 says: “Whoever then humbles himself as this child, he is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.” Most of us grownups are too proud and, well, grown up, to show the excitement and anticipation of a young boy looking forward to kindergarten.

Maybe it’s because we’ve looked forward to too many things that eventually turned out not as much fun as we thought. Is it inevitable that we’ll lose the wonder and imagination and trust that comes with childhood?

During our recent weekend in California, I was fortunate to run (walk) along the oceanfront every morning for an hour and a half. My route took me past a crowd of middle-aged surfers, all clad in well-worn black wetsuits. They didn’t seem like hippies, or Beach Boys, but appeared instead to be professionals of some sort. And they were all having a great time, cheering each other on, riding the waves, hanging ten, and all that.

I saw men and women riding bicycles with surfboard carriers attached to one side. I saw two men carrying surfboards on their backs in special backpacks. We saw one beautiful Lexus sedan with a surfboard strapped on top. (Cyndi said, “Don’t expect to ever see a surfboard on top of my Lexus, whenever I get one.”) They carried those surfboards with the anticipation and joy of Jonathan wearing his backpack. All they wanted to do was play in the water. “Let’s go now,” is what their faces said. “I’m ready!”

In the evenings, from our hotel room, via the Internet, Cyndi was working on her school bulletin board—the one in the main hallway beside the school office that for some reason has fallen into her realm of responsibility through the years. Each year, she puts photos of every teacher and staff on the bulletin board and includes interesting details about their lives.

This year, Cyndi asked each person to list three dreams—as in, three places they dream of going someday, or three things they want to do, or people they want to meet, if time and money were no object. These were Cyndi’s choices: (1) hike Mount Kilimanjaro on a nine-day guided trip, with family, (2) study serious ballroom dancing for a year and (3) take a Mediterranean cruise. Since I couldn’t let her play all by herself, I listed three for myself: (1) hike the Appalachian Trail, (2) take a year and study jazz trombone and (3) do an extended bicycle tour of New England or Scotland or England. A curious thing about this three-dream game is that some people simply won’t play along. They gave up dreaming years ago. It’s too bad they’ve forgotten how to play. My third California morning out along the oceanfront I listened to a podcast called “Phedippidations” about runner and writer and physician, George Sheehan. He was an early influence on me. I first read him in the fall of 1980 while at a two-week school on drilling and completion at Duncan, Okla.

Since then, I’ve read every book he wrote. I keep a framed photo of Dr. Sheehan in my office; he’s sitting at an old manual typewriter, obviously fresh from his run, typing out his daily thoughts. It’s one of my dreams about myself. He’s one of the people I want to be. In his book This Running Life, Sheehan writes: “I discovered that play is an attitude as well as an action. That action is, of course, essential. Play must be a total activity, a purifying discipline that uses the body with passion and intensity and absorption. Without a playful attitude, work is labor, sex is lust, and religion is rules. But with play, work becomes craft, sex becomes love, and religion becomes the freedom to be a child in the kingdom.”

We grownups realize not every day in young Jonathan’s year of kindergarten will be fun or safe or easy. We also know that following God will not always be fun or safe or easy. But can we still find a sense of play, or anticipation? I hope so.

Berry Simpson, a Sunday school teacher at First Baptist Church in Midland, is a petroleum engineer, writer, runner and member of the city council in Midland. You can contact him through e-mail at berry@stonefoot.org.