The Best of Jack’s Winning Words 5/13/24 – Originally sent May 13, 2010
“Age merely shows what children we remain.” (Goethe) The Happy Birthday Song entertains both children and the aged and is said to be sung more frequently than any other song. Do you know of someone who’s having a birthday today? Birthdays remind us of the passage of time, but Goethe reminds us that there is still life to live. Carpe diem! 😉 Jack
I’ve posted about this here a few times, almost always inspired by some post by the late Pastor Jack Freed. See my post – Learn how to play again or the one on Lighten up and learn how to play. In that second post I used a favorite quote from George Bernard Shaw – “We don’t stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing.”
The passage from childhood to our adult lives is filled with admonishments to “be serious” or to “stop acting like a child”. We are literally forced to give up our sense of wonder and the fantasies that help children cope so that we can become “grown ups”. But is that a good thing?
Certainly, we need to learn how to focus on the things that are required to live as an adult, but that does not preclude being able to get in touch with our childhood from time to time. Even our “play” can become something else, if we let it. Our games and the sports that we engage in lose their sense of play when they become competitive. Our need to keep score and measure ourselves against others replaces the pure joy of play.
One grows old no matter what; however, one does not have to completely lose their ability to play. Regain your inner childhood by finding things that you enjoy doing just because you are doing them – maybe something as simple as dancing. Then do them just to enjoy them. Don’t keep score. Don’t worry about where you finish or what the record score may be. Just enjoy doing and playing. Play as if no one is watching. Play as if the doing is all that maters. In the end, it is only the playing that really matters. Let your play show what a child you remain.
Posted by Norm Werner 
Sunday was a day dedicated to church and family time, and not a day filled with organized sports or other activities. In fact, when I was a kid in Illinois the state still had “Blue Laws”, which made it illegal to sell alcohol on Sundays and illegal to open retail stores. We used to drive across the Mississippi River into Missouri to shop on Sunday afternoon (after church, of course).
children busy (and off the streets). Out of that start more and more “little leagues” for all sports grew, until we have what we have today – seven-days a week sports activities that not only keep our kids off the streets but out of churches as well.
rejuvenation. Instead we are on the go rung to and from activities seven days a week. Not only don’t modern children get bored, they don’t get any rest either. There is less time for reading and play, because they have to get to the next game or to rehearsal for an upcoming recital. There is no time to just be a child; one has to get ready for the next competition. We are teaching them that it’s a win-lose world, a zero sum game in which the one who works the hardest wins. What a shame that they are no longer exposed to the win-win world of Christianity in which making the effort and helping others is more 
important than winning every time.
who have wandered away to watch a Sunday morning game. Sometime, somehow, in the back of their minds God will plant the seed that they are missing something in their lives and that the best place to fill that void is in church. Let’s just hope that the churches can hold on long enough for them to have a place to go back to when that happens. I’ll be there to welcome you back if that happens to you.
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