What’s the secret to depth later in life? Not only personally depth, but depth in friendship?
I know there must be many things, but the older I get the more I find myself circling back to one thing: fun.
Of course, there are people who excel at fun who are shallower than a kiddie pool in the winter. But when you meet someone who is wise, substantive, and able to have fun, you know you’ve met someone special. Likewise, if you’ve developed a relationship that treads as easily into weeping as it does into laughter, then you know you’ve forged a friendship worth protecting with your life. Many people seem to assume that the latter is harder than the former, but I’m not so sure. Or at the very least, it’s easier to complain and be weighted down by the world in friendship than it is to smile.
We do live in a heavy world. There are the big things: wars, school shootings, cancer diagnoses. But for most of us the small things weigh heavily on us: worries about work, finances, and the fact that there’s never enough time. The longer we live in a heavy world, the more we become heavy-hearted men and women.
When I was 18, it was easier to shrug off the weight and laugh. It’s not so easy today. As a teenager I could let loose. Dance. Embrace my own absurdity.
But time has a way of absorbing levity and giving gray hair in its place.
Perhaps that’s because we think seriousness is the same thing as maturity. It’s not. Vigilant sobriety is the path to hardness. It’s the gateway drug to becoming the sort of person who needs drugs (entertainment, alcohol, Xanax, marijuana, etc.) to crack a smile.
This is precisely why fun is so important in friendship—or at least the sort of friendship that produces mutual maturity. Fun is one of the few things friends can do together that shaves off the hard sediment accumulated after years of life’s everyday hardships. Fun in friendship frees men and women in a heavy-hearted world to become lighthearted. Gentle. Soft. Kind. Good.
Friendship is the training grain for living loosely to a world we cannot control—a world which will one day evaporate like vapor on hot day.
The Command to Have Fun
Christians do not always excel at fun. When we think of a good small group, we think of a group with lots of deep confession and long prayers. Not group that turns on music from high school and dances themselves silly. Don’t we need all three? The preacher in Ecclesiastes tells us,
I know that there is nothing better for people than to be happy and to do good while they live. (Ecclesiastes 3:12)
That makes the secret to life rather simple. The complicated part is making the choice. You must choose to have fun. Or you can sit silently in the corner while everyone else gives themselves over to cheer.
The wise man chooses to smile.
Fun has a bad rap in Christian circles because people habitually pursue fun in terrible ways. Overdrinking. Overeating. Crude humor. None of these things give you the true, deep-down benefits of sanctified, fun friendship.
That said, we must not allow improper fun to persuade us that there is no such thing as proper fun. After all, the Psalmist seems to think that laughter might even be an important part of worship,
Our mouths were filled with laughter, our tongues with songs of joy. Then it was said among the nations, “The LORD has done great things for them.” (Psalm 126:2)
I suspect God gives us laughter because laughter is not only a key ingredient in friendship, but also in accepting our own finiteness. No one can enjoy life if he thinks he’s the fourth member of the Trinity. With so much weight on his shoulders, how could he be anything but dour?
But when I laugh, I remember that I’m not God. When I laugh with friends, we collectively embrace our finiteness. We can control little alone. We can control little together. So, we laugh, knowing that the one in control loves us and gives us our laughter as a gift.
Those smiles soften us, even as they strengthen our trust in his sovereignty.
Making Space for Fun
The problem for most of us is that we don’t have time for fun in our lives or friendships. This may sound ridiculous, but you may need to schedule fun to make sure it happens. Of course, that’s not really possible—fun bubbles up and can’t be planned.
But you certainly can schedule times where fun is possible. If you don’t do that, you will likely never know fun with friends on the regular.
Treat it like an urgent priority. I know—hosting is hard on the front end. But if you never host, where will you have space for fun? Weekends are busy. But if you never say yes to a hangout, your life will be absent of the joy that comes from good food and good drink.
I had to do this recently. My men’s group all scheduled a day off work to go drive go-karts, play pickleball, and try out a VR simulator. It was hard to find a time. Even harder to give it up. By any normal measure, we were wasting our time. But we all agreed at the end: we arrived home lighter. More willing to get on the floor and engage with our kids, to slow down and laugh with our wives, to stop working and take joy with our coworkers.
But fun isn’t just for personal benefit. It honors God and draws friends together. So even if it does nothing for you, it fulfills the greatest commandment: love God and love others.
And you might be surprised by the good that past fun makes possible in the future. Only friendships with lightness have the strength to bear heaviness. If you’re diagnosed with cancer, you want someone who can both laugh and cry with you… and who knows the right moment for both.
But the time to find out which friends can do that is not on a gurney in a hospital.
This life is, properly understood, a bit like vapor (Ecclesiastes 1:2). It is transient. Impossible to control. Paradoxical. Like vapor, it is light. You are light. Stop taking yourself so seriously. Stop taking your stuff so seriously. Stop taking this life so seriously. Smile. Laugh. Crack a joke. “Banish anxiety,” as the author of Ecclesiastes commands us, by developing friendships that allow you to treat yourself and this life as the light vapor it is (Ecclesiastes 11:10).
So make space for gravity and fun. Mourning and laughing. Somberness and joy. That is the path to the deepest depths of friendship in our vaporous lives.
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