Category Archives: Monday Connection

Ben Witherington III turns to the subject of play in the seventh chapter of Work: A Kingdom Perspective on Labor (Eerdmans, 2011). If that seems odd to find near the end of a book about work in relation to belief in God, it’s all the more reason to consider what he says in this passage and to learn anew how to play:

Some people see games as an “escape” from the real world, and there is an element of truth in that. But play serves a variety of purposes – respite from the real world is but one of them; recreation, restoration, and renewal of hope are others. . . .

The Puritans used to scold their children by saying, “You have not come into this world for pleasure.” But that is a part of the Puritan work ethic that is well left behind. I would not take us back to the world of either Prometheus with all his labors or the world of the Puritans with theirs. Neither, in fact, brought in the Kingdom of God. No matter how hard we try to squelch the freedom that comes with play, it will crop up again, even in the circles of the most poor – stick ball in the streets of New York, soccer in a dirty field outside a poor village in Afghanistan. It appears that God made us for play, as well as work, and children have a stronger sense of this than most adults do. Perhaps this is an area of life where the workaholics could learn how “a little child shall lead them.”

It’s already been a hot summer in various regions of the United States. As someone who was raised in North Carolina and attended public schools that were mostly not air conditioned at the time, I can understand the life-changing impact of a shift to air conditioning in the homes of previous generations. In the sixth chapter of his book Work: A Kingdom Perspective on Labor (Eerdmans, 2011), Ben Witherington III recalls what that transition was like for him as part of the following reflection, which also refers to and quotes from Andy Crouch’s Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling (InterVarsity, 2008):

I remember the days before air conditioning. I remember sleeping on the wooden floor in front of the open front door on a hot, humid summer night in Wilmington, North Carolina. You hoped for a breath of a breeze in the morning, but this particular morning not only was there none, but you could have cut out a piece of humidity from the air on the front porch and eaten it! When air conditioning came along to beat the heat, all manner of Southerners like me said, “Huzzah!” The world can be a wilderness for humans unless we cultivate it, unless we create things to help us cope with it, unless we turn a tangled mess into a garden. This is what Crouch is calling us to, and he is saying that it is the primeval task God gave us in the first place. We must make something out of our world, not merely admire it. . . .

In one of his more interesting insights, Crouch points out that while God meant Adam to be a gardener and ruler, the Snake tempted him to be a consumer rather than a creator and cultivator. “We can only sigh with disappointment as Adam and Eve swallow, so to speak, the idea that a fruit could bring ‘wisdom,’ even as we recognize how adroitly contemporary advertisers persuade us of equally unlikely results if we will just consume their cosmetics, cars, or cigarettes.”

Are there people that you seek out or resources that you draw upon to learn how to garden (i.e., to nurture your own creativity within God’s creation)?