Brianna Lambert
11 min read ⭑
“Once we realize play is a good gift from God, we can view it on God’s terms, not the world’s. So much of the narrative around hobbies consists of being a means to an end. … These claims miss the beauty of play.”
Brianna Lambert lives in the cornfields of Indiana with her family, where she homeschools, writes and soaks up the immense beauty God has created around her. Her book, Created to Play, invites believers to view hobbies not as arbitrary passions but as vehicles for knowing God better and delighting in his love. She’s also a staff writer at The Gospel Coalition and writes for publications such as Christianity Today, Common Good and Mere Orthodoxy.
Enjoy our conversation with Brianna as she tells stories about what a fast-food chain like Culver’s means to her family, how sky-gazing draws her closer to God and how the Spirit invigorates the routine “dailiness of life” for her.
QUESTION #1: ACQUAINT
Food is always about more than food; it’s also about home and people and love. So how does a go-to meal at your favorite hometown restaurant reveal the true you behind your web bio?
At 7 years old, my family exchanged the palm trees and traffic of southern L.A. for the grids of Midwest agriculture. The sweeping horizons of my new Indiana home captivated me early on, and it was no surprise when, years later, my husband and I bought our first house nestled between corn and soybean fields. We tended our home and little plot of land as best we could, but it often sent us driving into town for parts. On weekends, we’d load the kids up in the car and head to the southernmost Menards you will find in the country. After a short detour in the shower aisle, where my children would open up door after door, we’d park our cart near lumber and search for the straightest 2x4s we could find. Once we loaded up our minivan, we’d drive across the parking lot for hamburgers and ice cream at Culver’s fast food chain. Between bites of french fries, we’d laugh about how long it took us to pick wood or work through our project plans on the napkin on the table.
It might be unfashionable to feel so fondly about a Midwestern fast food chain, but I don’t care. That little restaurant outside the hardware store has held my kids in all their ages and stages. It’s been the prepping ground for a dozen projects and alterations that have built our home and, consequently, our life. And just like the endless fields that fly past my window on my drive into town, it wraps me with the feeling of consistency and the feeling of home (sprinkles included).
Ljubomir Žarković; Unsplash
QUESTION #2: REVEAL
What “nonspiritual” activity have you found to be quite spiritual, after all? What quirky proclivity, out-of-the-way interest or unexpected pursuit refreshes your soul?
I’ve got a full list of the ways my favorite hobbies bring me to worship since it’s what I’ve been writing and thinking about for the last three years. Yet I’ll forego those typical hobbies, and instead focus on a smaller activity I’ve grown to love: looking up. As a kid, I loved to lie on the grass in my backyard and stare up at the white clouds dancing in the sky above me. I’d take in the depth of blues and become mesmerized. I’d stare intently at the edges of each cloud, marveling at how I felt like I was staring at the most incredible painting I’d ever seen. Of course, any painting pales in comparison to the sky God has created, but it was the only masterpiece I knew to hold it up to.
The clouds pushing across the sky made me feel small, but this smallness wasn’t shameful or demeaning. Instead, this was a feeling of utter awe that I got to exist in such a world and under such majesty as the God who made it all.
As an adult, I find myself often doing the same. I’ll pause to stare up at the clouds streaked across the sky or to take in the deep blues as I walk to feed our ducks. On hikes with my family, I’ll routinely look up from the trail toward the towering trunks and feel the gentle arms of that comforting smallness once again.
QUESTION #3: CONFESS
Every superhero has a weakness; every human, too. We’re just good at faking it. But who are we kidding? We’re all broken and in this thing together. So what’s your kryptonite, and how do you confront its power?
As the years go by, I have felt a greater awareness of my lack of follow-through. The graveyard of unfinished goals and ideas in my past betrays a bit of my own personality: creative, impulsive and entirely too optimistic sometimes. While I can see the fruit of these attributes, at times, the thorns poke through when they push me to be hasty or dishonest about reality. In some situations, the Lord has been teaching me to press on and exhibit fortitude with what I’ve begun. Sometimes I have quit when the going got tough or a new distraction entered.
Most often, though, I’ve felt the Lord calling me to answer my lack of follow-through by slowing down in what I begin. He’s been encouraging me to patiently survey my reality and lean upon others, like my husband, who can at times more accurately understand what I have time for. This practice pushes me to face my limits head-on. Turns out, as much as I may want to, I can’t learn Hebrew while I teach homeschool, write and complete my other responsibilities. I’m learning to accept my limits, the circumstances he’s placed me in, and the work he’s ordered for me to accomplish.
I’m hoping that, by his grace, the Lord continues to develop my fortitude, and that he would enable my yes to be yes because I can give a no that is no.
QUESTION #4: FIRE UP
Tell us about your toil. How are you investing your professional time right now? What’s your current obsession? And why should it be ours?
For the last several years, I have been diving deep into the world of hobbies and searching out all the ways the Lord uses these good gifts as opportunities for worship. I didn’t always feel that hobbies were this important. Early on in my faith, I had constructed a wall within my life. On one side was the religious part: church, Bible studies, prayer time. On the other side sat everything else: the books I loved to read, movies I enjoyed with my husband or our vacation to Florida.
Yet the more I learned about God, the more this changed. I started to understand the truth that “he is before all things and in him all things hold together” (Col. 1:17). I’d pore over Old Testament stories where God’s providence in seemingly mundane actions set the course of history and made all the difference.
My walls began to crumble, and I started to see God working in the very same way throughout those “secular” activities. I saw him teaching me while I kneaded a ball of dough on the counter. I saw how piping buttercream flowers onto a cake was a form of worship as I filled up the world with one tiny piece of beauty. All these observations turned into my book, “Created to Play: How Taking Hobbies Seriously Grows Us Spiritually,” where I urge readers to return to viewing play as a good and purposeful gift from our God.
Once we realize play is a good gift from God, we can view it on God’s terms, not the world’s. So much of the narrative around hobbies consists of being a means to an end. Our hobbies can be a side hustle for more money, provide us a following on the internet or simply be one more sphere to master. These claims miss the beauty of play. God says our play is good for its own sake.
These days, I’m obsessed with hearing how people play. I love seeing the joy on their face when they start to explain the activities that bring them delight, whether it’s a puzzle or paper crafting. I want to know what they’re learning from it and how God’s using it in their lives, and I want them to know it’s a worthy and beautiful gift from their Father. For this is all his world, after all.
QUESTION #5: BOOST
Whether we’re cashiers or CEOs, contractors or customer service reps, we all need God’s love flowing into us and back out into the world. How does the Holy Spirit invigorate your work? And how do you know it’s God when it happens?
There is a beautiful poem by Randall Jarrell called “Well Water” that talks about how “the dailiness of life” is full of “errand upon errand.” I think I can often turn to my work in that same manner, seeing it as a never-ending turn of the wheel pulling another pump of water from a well. Yet Jarrell doesn’t end with exhaustion: “And yet sometimes/ The wheel turns of its own weight, the rusty/ Pump pumps over your sweating face the clear/ Water, cold, so cold! you cup your hands/ And gulp from them the dailiness of life.”
I’ve tasted that cold gulp of water when the toil of a labor turns into pure joy and delight. At times this happens when the words start flowing in an article or a book chapter. Yet I don’t think this joy is tethered strictly to times of success. Instead, this kind of joy is rooted in the times when the Holy Spirit reminds me that the work I’m doing holds infinite worth. He helps me remember that my labors have a purpose. They aren’t, in actuality, meaningless errands upon errands, but a labor given to me to live out and move me toward a beautiful end.
The world around us pushes us to live within an alternate reality that centers on the immediate, temporary and even aimless. I need the Word of God and the help of his Spirit to keep pushing me to see the reality: there is immense beauty and purpose in every bit of the dailiness of life.
QUESTION #6: inspire
Scripture and tradition beckon us into the rich and varied habits that open our hearts to the presence of God. So let us in. Which spiritual practice is working best for you in this season?
In this current season, I have been trying to lean more into the local church community God has placed around me, and I have been so encouraged by the fruit. This practice doesn’t come naturally to my situation. Our family lives farther from church, and I can be a natural homebody. Besides that, my connections as an online writer make it even easier for me to devote myself to the relationships made across the computer screen instead of digging deeper into the community the Lord has put me in. Because of these temptations, I’ve noticed I need to be intentional about pursuing the local community God has given me.
Sometimes this looks like writing myself notes in my phone to text and follow up with someone I talked to Sunday morning. It looks like asking an older woman from church for a recipe instead of typing it into my search bar. It might resemble riding along with someone else to a church event so we can have a chance to talk, instead of holding that solo car time for myself. I’ve also found it means looking for ways to allow others to be in debt to me, and moreover, what’s even harder — putting myself in debt to others.
It’s pretty amazing to see how such little actions can add up in forming relationships and connecting you with the body of Christ. As a result, the Lord has continued to widen my understanding of him, his church, my role in this world and how important it is not to live this life alone.
QUESTION #7: FOCUS
Looking backward, considering the full sweep of your unique faith journey and all you encountered along the way, what top three resources stand out to you? What changed reality and changed your heart?
The biggest turn in my understanding of the Christian faith happened when I began to see the Bible as a complete narrative, and Graeme Goldsworthy’s “Gospel and Kingdom” was one of the first books that lit that fire within me. I felt like a little kid reading and squealing at the reflections of Christ and the singular message over and over again reiterated through the pages of the Bible. The foundation this book laid led me to study more and appreciate more the God who weaved together history so beautifully.
Athanasius’ “On the Incarnation” was another text that changed my life. While the actual content is rich and full in its own right, this book changed me in a different way: it proved I could read old texts. Perhaps it was my lack of a seminary degree or just plain fear, but prior to reading Athanasius, I believed I couldn’t do it. “On the Incarnation” revealed that these texts are for us all, and it set me on a mission to tell others the same. There is nothing more encouraging than to read something from a saint who lived 1,500 years ago and realize they had the same issues with sin, the same root struggles, and they shared the very same hope in the real and true Christ.
Finally, Malcolm Guite’s devotional poem collections (ex: “The Word in the Wilderness” and “Waiting on the Word”) have grown me creatively and spiritually. They are beautiful. Guite’s poem selections and subsequent meditations have brought me to tears and deepened my love for the art of poetry itself.
Certain things can be godsends, helping us survive, even thrive, in our fast-paced world. Does technology ever help you this way? Has an app ever boosted your spiritual growth? If so, how?
I’ve got to go back to my community on this one: I love our church app. Within our church app, we have a prayer board where people can post prayer requests, and I absolutely love being reminded about what’s going on at our church. Even if I may not have a close relationship with someone, I can still see their name and pray for them. Beyond that, I am encouraged just to see other people commenting their own prayers in reply, offering help and checking back in on each other.
Sometimes we use the app to get ministry updates, or people ask each other questions about who might be a good electrician or if they have an extra couch to get rid of. Every post just reminds me of the beautiful body of Christ, and it tethers me a little closer to my family.
QUESTION #8: dream
God’s continually stirring new things in each of us. So give us the scoop! What’s beginning to stir in you but not yet fully awakened? What can we expect from you in the future?
Spending so much time researching for “Created to Play” allowed me to see the joy of studying a topic thoroughly and thinking deeply about it. I’d love to continue in that same vein, studying and thinking about the most ordinary parts of our lives that the Lord uses to shape and mold us. Lately, I’ve been turning around the topic of the cyclic patterns of our days. I don’t know where the Lord will take that, but I’m holding it open to him to nudge me wherever he wants. Next fall, I’ll be adding a new title as a ninth-grade English teacher at my kids’ co-op, and I can’t wait to see how God uses this role to shape and form my own writing for the future.
There’s such a hard push in this industry to stay relevant, keep up content and produce, produce, produce. I’ll admit, I feel that tug and pressure, but I don’t want to give in. I hope to keep trusting that the Lord will give me his work to do. In the meantime, I’ll keep trying to write more pieces of beauty into this world for whoever God intends to read it.
How do you view work? As a tough job to be endured? A daily eight-hour period to get through as quickly as possible so you can enjoy the evenings and weekends? Or is it meant to be a source of delight and satisfaction?
Ecclesiastes tells us, “Behold, what I have seen to be good and fitting is to eat and drink and find enjoyment in all the toil with which one toils under the sun the few days of his life that God has given him, for this is his lot” (5:18, ESV).
This doesn’t mean work — whatever daily toil God has called us to — will be easy. Or that it should always be fun. Or that we should devote all our time to it. But we are created to find enjoyment in it and to turn that joy back to God in worship.
Brianna Lambert is the author of Created to Play: How Taking Hobbies Seriously Grows Us Spiritually. Her articles and essays have appeared in Christianity Today, The Gospel Coalition, Common Good, Mere Orthodoxy and elsewhere. Brianna also serves on staff at Gospel-Centered Discipleship and helps serve with the women’s ministry at her local church. You can follow her writing on her Substack newsletter, From Glory to Ordinary.