Sometimes when I wake up in the morning, I just want to be left alone; but my daughter and I have this routine that involves her doing a lot of imaginative play. This, of course, extends into the afternoon. Every day.

I worry about the times (like today) when my heart isn’t in it. When I don’t want to be imaginative. Am I hurting her in some way? And is my half-hearted play having a negative impact? Am I changing the way she plays?

I was thinking about another place this happens for me: costumes at church. I like acting, but not so much dressing up. I think it goes back to childhood when I began to have a lot of anxiety during the week before Halloween. It just seemed like a lot of pressure to make a really great costume. The whole thing was overly competitive. And growing up in the late 1980s, the other boys started dressing up as Freddy and Jason and Michael and other slasher villains. The pressure to make a great costume was morphing into the pressure to wear a particular kind of costume. I hated it. I didn’t outgrow Halloween; I quit it because it wasn’t fun.

At my last church, I was told of a Halloween expectation: the clergy had to dress up and play with the kids. My childhood anxiety resurfaced.

But think about this for a moment: what is special about having the clergy dress up? Isn’t it the attention and the surprise of seeing someone who is serious cutting loose and being silly? What changes for the congregation when silliness is required—when spontaneity is demanded? Isn’t the very nature of what is valuable about it compromised? If you demand that I play with you in a specific way, are you going to get the best out of me?

Perhaps the biggest problem, as I see it, is in seeing this ritual of dress-up as a symbol of spontaneity and joyfulness; the adherence to the symbol actually destroys it, because the dress-up becomes routine. For those that know me, doing things in a new or different way is something I am all about. I just don’t dig on costumes. So is my honest spontaneity in other parts of the life of the church of less value than the imposed (not really) spontaneity of a scripted annual event? And hasn’t the event lost all value?

It seems that in the church we’ve moved into this new frontier where there is more expected from the clergy than ever before. Be serious and silly. But only be serious at this time and only silly at that time. Be a good student here but a class clown there. Isn’t the expectation that clergy will be a certain way, let alone all of a certain many ways, making us all a lot less happy and satisfied?

As a parent, I’m constantly dealing with two realities about my child’s development: she needs lots of spontaneous play and lots of scripted, repetitive play. I get really tired of the latter, but the former requires even more energy and creativity out of me. So when I’m tired, we end up playing the same way we did all day yesterday, which gets me frustrated and angry because there is only so many times I can hand puppet certain characters or go play ball in the backyard. And just like the church will often do, those routines and patterns can eat up all of our time.

So when are Daddy and Daughter happiest? When we are both playing in a new way—discovering and claiming a new favorite thing.

What will you claim as your new favorite?