Can you imagine a God who dances with shouts of joy, laughs when you laugh, loves to play, enjoys life, and invites us to join the fun? I couldn’t until recently.

I grew up with a serious, workaholic type of God who chastised me for not keeping busy twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Even when I realized this was not what God was really like, it was hard to change. I felt guilty when I slowed down, took a break, or just went out and had fun. This following Jesus is serious business after all. Like the disciples who tried to chase away the children that came to Jesus, I couldn’t be bothered with frivolous practices where play and laughter disrupted my routines. Gasping in awe and wonder at an opening blossom or a slow-moving caterpillar seemed like a waste of time.

Then one year my early Lenten readings included the verse “Unless you become like children you cannot enter the kingdom of God.” These words riveted my attention.

The next day I came across an article by Dr. Stuart Brown, who has dedicated his life to the study of play. We all need play, he believes. It connects us to others, sharpens our minds, and may even help us avoid degenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s. “What you begin to see when there’s major play deprivation in an otherwise competent adult is that they’re not much fun to be around,” he says. “You begin to see that the perseverance and joy in work is lessened and that life is much more laborious.”1

“Seek the kingdom of God above all else,” Jesus repeatedly tells his disciples, and this has been the passion of my life. How could play, fun, and the delights of childhood prepare us for this? There was rarely anything childlike about my spirituality or that of my friends and colleagues.

“Let the little children come to me; do not stop them; for it is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs” (Mark 10:14 NRSV). Have we dismissed the child within us and lost the joy of life and the delight in God that emerges when we play and laugh and marvel at the world around us?

Ask kids what they don’t like about adults and they say we don’t have enough fun. We don’t enjoy life enough and we don’t enjoy God enough either. To enjoy God more fully and recognize God’s delight in us, we must rediscover the world of childhood and unleash the inner child hidden deep in our souls.

I posted this question on Facebook: What are the childlike characteristics that make us fit for the kingdom? I was amazed at the enthusiastic response:

• playfulness

• awe and wonder

• imagination

• curiosity

• love of nature

• compassion

• unconditional trust

These all emerged as childlike qualities that my friends thought were important preparation for the new world Jesus came to introduce us to. Of course, others pointed out that children can also be aggravating, bothersome, and intrusive at the most inopportune moments. Yet as Judy Brown Hull suggests in her insightful book When You Receive a Child: Reflections on Luke 9:46-48, even these can be gifts from God that reflect something of the kingdom and the intrusiveness of Jesus as he enters our lives. “Unselfconscious, bothersome, unpredictable—children have another similarity to Jesus: while they are fully human—they do not fit tidily into the totally adult world any better than Jesus did.”2 She provocatively goes on to suggest that this might be because Jesus’ reality is closer to that of a child than an adult.

Having listed childlike characteristics that make us fit for the kingdom, responders often commented, “I’ve never thought about this before.” Delighting in fun and laughter as a pathway to enjoying God is something most of us never consider.

We suffer from play deprivation, nature deficit disorder, awe depletion, compassion fatigue, imagination suppression, and more. As a result I think we suffer from God deprivation too.

I am increasingly convinced that rediscovering our inner child is essential for our spiritual health. It has become an important and delightful journey for me and is the central theme of The Gift of Wonder.

Awe and wonder, imagination and curiosity connect us to the God who is present in every moment and everything in a way that nothing else can. They enrich our contemplative core and expand our horizons to explore new aspects of our world and our God. Believing in a God who loves to plant gardens with dirty hands and make mud pies to put on the eyes of the blind, or who does happy dances and sings with joy over all of humanity and in fact all of creation has revolutionized my faith.

Ironically, my life has been filled with joy and satisfaction, though I have rarely linked this to my spiritual practices. My childhood in Australia was filled with fun family summer caravan adventures. I studied medicine and delighted in my years as a family physician in New Zealand. In 1981 I joined a fledgling part of Youth with a Mission called Mercy Ships and enjoyed the privilege of establishing a hospital on board the MV Anastasis, to perform cleft lip and palate and eye surgeries. Over the twelve years I spent on board, I facilitated surgical outreaches in Mexico, the Caribbean, and Africa. I worked with refugees on the Thai-Cambodian border, in Haiti, and in Ivory Coast. I saw thousands of lives transformed and had the intense joy and satisfaction of knowing my life had made a difference.

After I left the ship, my life took another direction, but I still find intense joy in what I accomplish as an author, speaker, and blogger. Helping people create spiritual pathways that lead them toward a deeper relationship with God is a delight.

My faithful companion over the last twenty-six years of this journey has been my husband, futurist and author Tom Sine. He is constantly researching how our world is changing and how we need to change to be more creative in helping people imagine new possibilities for their lives, churches, and neighborhoods. He loves to cook, walk our dog, and garden with me, and has enthusiastically supported my writing. His insightful and often playful responses to my sharing of new practices have kept me on track throughout.

Tom and I live in a small intentional community in Seattle called the Mustard Seed House. We enjoy a weekly meal and check-in times, which have often provided space for experimenting with the practices I share in this book. We also love to share food from our garden with friends and sometimes strangers from all over the world.