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Pastor's Ponderings
“Clean up! Clean up, everybody, everywhere. Clean up! Clean up,
everybody, do your share.”
- Children’s song
This past Sunday we finished our series, "Imagine the People of God." At
the heart of the series was a simple conviction: the Spirit of God is a playful
Spirit — one who creates necessary disruption so that we can see the world
in a new way, and who invites us into the connection, creativity, dreaming,
and compassion that playfulness makes possible.
After the service, Sherry Johnson caught me and suggested that the perfect
way to end worship would have been to sing the clean-up song and have
everyone clean up together. She was right. It was genius — and, in
hindsight, an almost embarrassingly obvious thing we overlooked in our
planning.
But Sherry's instinct points to something important: cleanup is not the end
of play. It is part of it.
In the book I referenced throughout this series — Play: How It Shapes the
Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul — Dr. Stuart Brown
writes:
“Part of the license to play freely comes from being in an
environment that is structured enough to provide a feeling of
safety, so that the child is confident that nothing bad is going to
happen. Part of the freedom to alter the natural order of things
(“Let’s say this car can fly”; “Let’s throw all the Legos in a big
pile on the floor and see what we can make from them”) is the
knowledge that order will be restored again afterward.
Preschool kids may not want to stop playing and clean up, but if
every day at ten a.m. they are told in a nonjudgmental,
nonangry way that it’s time to clean up, and a game is made of
it, they will feel the emotional logic of reasonable boundaries,
and within this consistency find comfort.”
(Dr. Stuart Brown, Play, pg. 97)
One of the things we try to teach children is that when we make a mess —
whether we meant to or not — we clean up after ourselves. Restoring order
is what makes the next round of play possible. It is what keeps the space
safe, creative, and free!
We would do well, as adults, to remember this.
And then there is the harder lesson. Anyone who has spent time around
children knows the response: "But I didn't do that." Or the classic: "Not me."
And sometimes that's true. But in a shared space, membership in the
community sometimes means cleaning up a mess you didn't make —
because the alternative is that no one gets to play.
Imagine children arriving in the morning to find their play area in disarray
— not because of anything they did, but because something happened after
they left. They cleaned up faithfully the day before. And yet, if they want a
space where they can be free, creative, and safe, they will have to be willing
to restore it together before the playing can begin.
This is not unfair. This is community.
In order for all of God's children to thrive — to live in the connection,
comfort, and safety that genuine flourishing requires — sometimes we will
have to help clean up messes we had no part in making. That is what it
means to be the people of God together.
Let's keep imagining it. And let's keep doing the work.
Shalom,
Pastor Owen
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