Day Seventy-One

PLEASE PLAY

This is the day that the LORD has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it.

—PSALM 118:24 ESV

Yesterday—discipline. Today—let’s play. Yes. Play! The two go hand in hand more than you may realize. Do you have fun in your daily life?

It may not seem important or brave to make play a priority, but you have got to be brave to step away from responsibilities. To dismiss the lie that your career will fall apart if you spend some time having fun.

Play outside. Play with your friends. Do the things you loved to do when you were a kid because it reconnects you to a simpler time, stress wasn’t quite such a thing, and your heart was a simpler place to live and love.

It’s almost like a deep breath on a really hard journey of courage.

I was on a mission trip in Scotland, and our whole team was arguing. Some things had gone wrong, and we had just been in tight quarters for too long. So our team leaders canceled a three-hour afternoon we had planned and instead took our team to go play Ultimate Frisbee.

It’s almost like a deep breath on a really hard journey of courage.

People were slamming into each other and running and jumping and flying through the air. It was really aggressive, and we started out mad.

But do you know what happened? We ended up laughing.

It was a great example of how play can heal and how play matters to us and why we’ve got to do that. Being disciplined and being brave are not easy tasks. If you don’t make space in your life for play, you will burn out. You will be in that spot where you are fighting for brave because you are feeling failure well up and fears arrive uninvited and there will be no healthy release. So play.

Brave people know that it’s not just okay to play. It’s healthy.

This day that you’re in? This is the day the Lord has made. You can rejoice and be glad in it. You can have fun and laugh and be peaceful about your to-do list because God is in control, and you can have total peace in Him.

BE BRAVE: Go play! For real, do something fun.