On not leaving the park

Even the most prosaic, humble park can reawaken wonder and refreshment from the tired busyness of everyday life or eradicate cabin fever, whether that fever was caught in an office cubicle or attained within the four walls of one’s own home.  Just ask the urban planners of Central Park in New York, whose foresight saved New Yorkers tens of millions of dollars in antidepressant prescriptions, doubtless.  Juxtaposed against urban jungles, or even contrasting the mundane flora of wheat and cotton fields, city parks have a way reminding us that life can be simple, even amid complexity, or can present diversity amid monotony.  Parks are meant to be relaxing, meant to be fun.  Some parks have trains or hobby-horses (or carousels, as I’ve been informed they’re called).  Cotton candy and corn dogs abound, as well as deep fried Oreos (wait...maybe that last one is the state fair).  Who would want to leave and return to the drab, weary existence of a desk job; or to your same old toys if you’re a four-year old.  That’s what may have been compelling the four-year old I recently encountered at the park having a paroxysm tantamount to a conniption when her mother gently urged her it was time to leave the park.  I sympathize with her.  In many ways, I have been her.   Literally, yes, but even more so metaphorically.  Someone who thinks there is more pleasure to be had at the park, even once your mother has left without you.  Oh sure, you might get one or two more good snacks and rides in, briefly.  But soon you would realize the diminishing returns of staying at the park alone as a four-year old.  Protection, gone.  Provision, gone.  Not only do you not have money for more rides on the hobby...- I mean, carousel - you don’t money for anything, period.  The sweet geese that you fed bread to an hour ago (or as waterfowl protection agencies inform us would be better, oats, seeds, etc.) suddenly become potential terrors that you may have to spend the night with.   The gate that kept the mundane world out before will now lock you in with all your ill-gotten pleasures that rapidly become your demise.  That is how we are and who we are when we rail against the Father who gives us all good things just so we can have a moment of ill-gotten pleasure with sin.  We entrench ourselves in our own frenzy, not realizing the chaos we’re weaving for ourselves in the process, forgetting we have a Father who gives us all good things if we ask.  “My son,’ the father said, ‘you are always with me, and everything I have is yours.” (Luke 15:31)