The Have Fun On Purpose "Manifesto"

*If by "manifesto" you mean "loose and arbitrary made-up collection of ideas without any basis in research"

Hi friends,

I started deploying the phrase “have fun on purpose” a year or two ago as part of my own journey towards reclaiming some agency with my mental, spiritual, and physical health. I think I first articulated it when Brian and I decided to go to a Garth Brooks concert? We paid for those tickets with our hard-earned money that could have been used elsewhere, drove the three hours north to Edmonton, even arranged childcare and paid for a hotel, just to learn that apparently I still had every word of “Ain’t Going Down ‘Til The Sun Comes Up” locked in a secret vault of my heart just waiting for this opportunity to scream-sing with 60,000 other people.

I called that experience ‘having fun on purpose’ because it took so much planning and orchestrating from child care to finances to work schedules. We wanted to have fun but like a lot of grown-ups, we had to do it on purpose. It wasn’t happening by accident, you know? And I’ll be honest with you: it was, indeed, a tremendous amount of fun. We had an absolute ball. I sang my heart out, cried all my mascara off when Trisha Yearwood showed up unannounced to sing “She’s In Love With The Boy,” and I danced all evening. I beamed for days afterwards. It was the very best time. No notes.

Afterwards, that idea of having fun on purpose kept cropping up here at Field Notes as I’ve been on a bit of a journey in regards to my mental, emotional, spiritual, and physical health. After a season of intense loss, I ran out of trying-harder and I ran out of myself. And so, I desperately began to “pull levers” about three years ago with uncharacteristic intensity and intention, desperate for some relief and healing in my body and soul. Having fun on purpose was one very key lever. I even made that mantra my official theme for 2023. As a bit of a spoiler, even in my upcoming new book, I wrote a whole chapter about the importance of joy as part of our faith deconstruction experience, too so I’ve been circling this for a while now. Hence: a made-up manifesto began to emerge.

Why?

For too many years, I sorted everything in my life into two separate piles: sacred vs. secular. Jesus-y stuff as defined by the church like quiet times and being at church and serving the poor and ministry-to-the-point-of-burn-out, well, that was obviously sacred and so therefore, better. And consequently, I put any ordinary thing that brought joy to me into the ‘secular’ pile, somehow denigrating it and ranking my own joy and wholeness as less-than or absent of God’s spirit.

Spoilers: this was misguided nonsense. Utter gnostic nonsense.

I erected a wall between what was sacred and what was secular in my life, but Jesus has been joyfully bulldozing that non-existent boundary, reminding me over and over that the whole of our human experience is blessed. The incarnation also means God with us, in every area of our lives, in the deepest valleys of sorrow AND in our ordinary happinesses.

But I don’t mind telling you that it has felt ridiculous and impossible at times. We’ve had some very intense challenges as a family in these years, such that I’ve rediscovered depths of intercessory prayer that I did not know I possessed. People I love are suffering. Work has been stressful. The world feels like a dumpster fire, the majority of Church like an adventure in missing the point, and much of the discourse has felt like Ecclesiastes vanity-vanity-all-is-vanity despair. The notion of prioritizing “having fun” feels privileged at best, delusional and selfish otherwise. These are serious times: we need serious people etc.

And yet, having fun on purpose been one of the things that has saved my life this year. It helps me show up for our moment in time and my particular life.

Right in the midst of some of the hardest challenges we’ve faced, finding ways to have fun on purpose has brought joy, healing, connection, community, belonging to all of us. I have desperately needed to be at full-strength for our family and for our world these days, and looking after myself was an integral part of how I could do that well now and for the long haul.¹

It turned out that having fun on purpose wasn’t selfish or myopic or privileged. It was necessary. It was necessary for me to stay engaged. It was necessary for my own healing. It was necessary for resistance to the powers and principalities of this world. It was necessary for wholeness. It was necessary for engagement in our shared challenges and opportunities. It was necessary to remember how to be a person alive in the world. Who knew, eh?

Now I finally know that it is holy work to notice and bless and bring intention to beauty and joy and fun in our lives. God’s grace is also present in everything that brings goodness to us. And more of God’s grace and goodness in this world is worth saving, worth noticing, worth embodying perhaps especially when everything is difficult.

I have never forgotten how, in the incredible novel The Colour Purple, womanist author Alice Walker wrote, “I think it pisses God off if you walk by the colour purple in a field somewhere and don't notice it. People think pleasing God is all God cares about. But any fool living in the world can see it always trying to please us back.”

Everything that makes us gloriously human are those glimpses of God. Like noticing the colour purple, of course, and it’s also in things like friendship, music, dancing, laughter, art, sex, poetry, flowers, craft, swimming, communal singing, all the ways we connect and declare and bless and transcend.

Throughout the year, I’ve been kind of jotting down ideas or foundations/principles around this notion of having fun on purpose and jokingly calling it a manifesto (because that is such an silly influencer word which has ceased to have any meaning so why not use it here, eh?). In honour of the midsummer time, I thought it was a good time to share it.

So for this week’s Field Notes, here’s my made-up and in-process

Having Fun On Purpose “Manifesto”