You're listening to the Allender Center podcast with Dr. Dan Allender.

This week, Dan launches a new series about the nature of play and the importance of pursuing play in our everyday lives.

The kind of play Dan talks about goes far beyond distraction and escape.

Instead, play becomes a way for us to rediscover the goodness,

wildness, and playfulness at the heart of God.

There is no better time than summer to consider the importance of play.

What we're going to do really through a great portion of these

summer podcasts is to think with you about the importance of giving your heart, mind, body, spirit

to and over to play. The dilemma was saying that summer is a great time

to think about play, is that it then gets associated with taking breaks, having a vacation,

having a little last work. And so you've got the binary. The play is often considered

to be the contrast or the opposite of the word work. What I'm hoping to accomplish is really to

set out a conversation and definition of play that it is the way we live out being in the

kingdom of God. That if your work is not play, then is a good, good picture of living a divided

life. If you do not love what you do, if it is not playful,

then in many ways you're going to ultimately lose a sense of life at work. So that then what you need

when you leave work is something that is play that allows you to be distracted from

the work that you really don't enjoy. So this series is really an invitation to think about

calling, to think about the nature of how play is wed into virtually every portion of life, and that if we

come to a richer and deeper understanding of a concept of play, it can change how you go about a day,

how you go about living in the decades that you have left on this earth. So I consider this not to be a frivolous topic,

but one that is so very central to the gospel. But when most people think of play, they think of

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