Delight

Rediscovering Dumb Fun

Bill Watterson

The giggles were contagious. One of them was overcome with them, and they spread to the other. My two sons (5 and 2 1/2-years-old, respectively) were unable to stand they were laughing so hard. As far as I could tell, the game was to run as fast as you can to dad (me) and punch him in the arm, then run away laughing to the swingset where you jump, superman-style, on the swing. Then it was the other brother’s turn. I was supposed to be reading a book to prep for a sermon in the future, but had become a checkpoint on a chaotic game with no winners, no losers, no point, just two brothers losing their minds in a childhood giggle festival.

Their game made no sense, it didn’t have to, they loved it. I loved it. For a few minutes, increasingly sore left arm aside, I was lost in delighting in watching my kids be wild. My work didn’t get done, the book never got read, but the boys played and I loved it.

Dave Zahl has an excellent piece in Christianity Today about the importance of play in the life of a Christian, I recommend it highly. He oulines why play is a necessity, and why in a world obsessed with productivity and KPIs and maximizing shareholder value, the best and most countercultural thing a person can do is waste some time having fun.

Silliness and self-deprecation become not just virtues but acts of resistance in a world (and a church) that enshrines productivity more with each passing day. You will know them not just by their works of love but by the “useless” laughter that accompanies those works. -Dave Zahl

Too often, though, play becomes performance. We go quickly from running for fun to checking our metrics and measuring ourselves against our neighbor. We go from doinking a pickleball with a friend to cursing because we just lost to a stranger.

Calvinball, the chaotic game made up by Calvin and his stuffed tiger Hobbes is more what is needed. In Calvinball the rules change and are made up as the game goes, the points are arbitrary, there’s wickets sometimes and mallets in other cases. The only constant seems to be the players can’t ever play the game the same way twice. It’s dumb. Silliness is the point. There is no way to get better at Calvinball, no way to track your metrics, no way to maximize your output. Calvin doesn’t care about his Value Over Replacement Players¹ in Calvinball, he isn’t attempting to find an inefficiency in the defense and exploit it. He’s just playing.

When my two sons were playing in the yard, they didn’t know it, but they were tapped into a reality where there is no condemnation, no despair, no judgement. They were living in pure grace. When we remove play from our lives we remove these moments of grace. We divorce ourselves from reality. We are REALLY saved by grace. We are REALLY living in a reality where there is no condemnation, despair, or judgement, we just sometimes forget it. We hide our head in the false reality that we need to do more, be better, or earn through achievement. We trade Calvinball for KPIs and we are so much worse of for it.

God delights in you, when your playing some silly game and the giggles get you doubled over, He delights in you. In the seemingly pointless and inconsequential moments of your day, He delights in you. This world is broken, it feels like it is on fire all the time, but it is also the place where we can find profound joy in the meaningless.

May we all giggle today, may we learn to be easy laughers, may we delight in the mundane and live in pure grace.

1. From Wikipedia “In baseball, value over replacement player is a statistic popularized by Keith Woolner that demonstrates how much a hitter, pitcher or outfielder contributes to their team in comparison to a replacement-level player who is an average fielder at that position and a below average hitter.”