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

This week, Dan continues a series about play by discussing what comes before deep, meaningful play,

anticipation, imagination, and preparation.

Dan challenges us to approach our play with intentionality and resolve

so that we can play our way into goodness and delight.

I just walked through the kitchen a bit after lunch,

and my wife informed me to my horror that friends of ours have children who

have started school already. This happens to be August 4th. And I'm on the departure,

border of departure, for really the most significant adventure or play of the summer,

and that is the motorcycle trip that I've spoken about that I'll be doing with John Eldridge

and his sons, Sam, Blaine, and Luke, and another of their dear friends, John. And the six of us with a film crew

and support personnel will be on about an eight-day journey in the back country of Colorado,

filming a motorcycle trip, fly fishing, but ostensibly really to talk about the nature of story

and the nature of how story in the midst of both adventure and play as well as conversations

about the nature of life has its own story in and of itself. The reality that you tell a story in the context

of a story or in the context of relationships that constitute a particular scene, place, time, stage,

and that story intersecting with the people, the time, the place, becomes part of a

larger story.

And that story, of course, bears another level, but always under the great story of the

gospel.

So our focus over this category, a play, has been an invitation to you

to begin that process of, if not this summer, then this fall, or in the years for you ahead. How

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