Explore! Play!

Spiritual rhythms can become a mere exercise. Work, with little benefit. This is true with personal rhythms as with family rhythms.

Much of the time we need to humbly persevere until our hearts rediscover the value of our spiritual rhythm. But whether we continue on – or swap out our rhythms...
God is calling us to something more.

We cannot be parents who cling to empty religion – frozen by a fear God will not meet us anywhere else. Empty religious ritual becomes a danger to our children’s spiritual discipleship:

Children are more perceptive than we often give credit. And they are extremely honest with themselves. As they grow up in our homes they are privately resolving – as many of us did – to abandon what seems useless or faulty once they become parents with their own homes and families. This includes empty religion.

It is far better to authentically lead our families on a search for meaningful rhythms than to stubbornly hang on to a “form” of religion for months or years on end.

God’s whole world – and all the activities in it – are the relational spaces God designed, through which He wants to engage us. It is an enormous playground! There is literally no end to the physical places and activities He wants to show us and meet us in.

He made us relational. He made us creative. He made us to play. It only makes sense that such a good Father would call us to a new area of His playground – solely to show us new things and delight us in new ways.

Each new piece of play equipment grows our trust in Him and draws out aspects of who He made us to be – aspects we have either never known or have lost touch with as we’ve “adulted.” He wants us to enjoy more. More of the child He created at the first.

Our spiritual rhythms are not intended to be a solitary corner of His playground. We should live with an expectation of Him calling us 'out' and 'beyond'. Our good Father will not let us become dull or apathetic. He calls us out of our 'safe places' to play, adventure, and to grow.

He is always near. But listen for His voice calling you to something new. Your children – by watching you go through this process – will be learning how to follow Him to new delights when it is their time.

[Father] often seemed willing to omit prayers for what I could not always count sufficient reason: he had a horror at their getting to be a matter of course, and a form; for then, he said, they ceased to be worship at all, and were a mere pagan rite, better far left alone. I remember also he said, that those, however good they might be, who urged attention to the forms of religion […] were however innocently, just the prophets of Pharisaism; that what men had to be stirred up to was to lay hold upon God, and then they would not fail to find out what religious forms they ought to cherish.

– George MacDonald, “The Vicar’s Daughter”