Rediscovering Play

Do you have trouble making time to play? Brianna Lambert nudges us to embrace such delight.

Elisa

Rediscovering Play

By Brianna Lambert

There are joys fashioned within you. They sit quietly while you run errands and check off to-do lists, but occasionally they catch the spark that pulls them surging to the surface. Anne of Green Gables found delight in a perfectly crafted name. “When I hit on a name the suits exactly it gives me a thrill. Do things ever give you a thrill?” she asked.

Yes, they do. I feel that thrill when I clip on my thirty-pound backpack and head out for another day on the trail. It stirs my spirit while turning another single-crochet stitch or crafting a poem. That same feeling turns my mouth into a beaming grin as I sit in the audience of a musical or catch my ducks dipping their beaks into the water for a drink.

These thrills don’t originate solely because of the trees, the yarn, or the ducks, but they spring from deeper desires that find satisfaction within each of my hobbies. My crocheting and writing awaken my desire to create objects of beauty—just as my Father delights to create. Mountain trails beckon me because my heart aches to feel small and behold a greater beauty.

Your hobbies accomplish the same. They ignite within you deep joys that satisfy the purpose your Father forged within you. Unfortunately, we often don’t get the opportunity to understand this because we’re too busy feeling guilty about our play. We listen to the whispers in the back of our mind that tell us we’re only being lazy and unproductive. Sound familiar? In order to adequately appreciate the ways you and I were created to play, we must first throw off some misconceptions.

Many of us worry that taking part in our hobbies means succumbing to idleness. Nobody wants to be lazy. The book of Proverbs reminds us often of the dangers of the sluggard. These admonitions hang over our head as we take a break with a good book on the couch or spend an evening under the stars. Aren’t we being lazy?

Instead of the absence of toil, medieval scholars defined idleness as a refusal of our created purpose. We find the purpose of our being within the pages of the Scriptures. In them we discover we were made to image God, worship him, reflect his character, proclaim his glory, create beauty, cultivate his land, and multiply in the earth. God fashioned us to receive his gifts, acknowledge our dependence, and accomplish the good works he prepared for us. These are only a few of the ways we fulfill our role as God’s children. This frees us from the guilt that looms over us as we partake in our hobbies. The question we must ask instead is whether our hobbies enable us to fulfill the purposes for which we were made.

Close by our fear of laziness within hobbies lies our fear of their inefficiency. Goals and to-do lists fill our day and create a framework of life based on problems and solutions. Consequently, our hobbies feel unnecessary. We wonder what we accomplished by spending an afternoon with a fishing pole and an empty net. The metal lawn ornament we spend the weekend welding feels needless when we could have bought the ten-dollar replica at the farm store.

When God created the world, he encountered no problem to solve. Acts tells us that our sovereign God isn’t served by human hands, and he’s never had need of his people (Acts 17:25). We call this attribute his aseity. It means that before the trees sprang up from the ground, before the otters splashed in the water, and before Adam breathed through his nostrils, God was perfectly content. He didn’t need a friend, a creative outlet, or more worship. Our world wasn’t a solution, but a new creation birthed from the love and grace of God. Like a fountain, God’s outpouring of love and creativity emanated from the Trinity out of his own pleasure.

Because we’re made in the image of God, we too can create and enjoy absent of any measurable need. The song we composed that dances in our head alone still holds value even when it’s not topping charts or going viral on the internet. The wood-burning project we labored over can matter to the Lord even when it doesn’t check any boxes of usefulness. The collection of bobbleheads on our desk may not fix any problems in our life, but that doesn’t mean its existence is inconsequential. You and I can follow our maker in creating and playing simply for the love of it.

Can you see the potential within your play? Whether you love classic movies, rock climbing, or rolling homemade sushi, God has scattered opportunities to grow in worship. For too long we’ve overlooked the beauty God has fashioned within our play. Let’s start paying attention.

Adapted from Created to Play: How Taking Hobbies Seriously Grows Us Spiritually by Brianna Lambert. Copyright (c) 2026 by Brianna Lambert. Used by permission of InterVarsity Press. www.ivpress.com

Brianna Lambert is a writer and author from a rural community outside Indianapolis. She is the author of the recently released book, Created to Play. Her articles and essays have appeared in Christianity Today, The Gospel Coalition, Common Good, Mere Orthodoxy, and elsewhere. Brianna also serves on staff at Gospel-Centered Discipleship and writes for the women’s ministry at her local church. You might find her backpacking, camping, waterskiing, or starting a brand-new hobby with her husband and three children. Connect with her at briannalambert.com