1KHO 868: Creating and Playing Simply For The Love Of It | Brianna Lambert, Created To Play

**Ginny Yurich** (0:00)
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Welcome to The 1000 Hours Outside Podcast. My name is Ginny Yurich. I'm the founder of 1000Hours Outside. And I have just read a heartwarming book, an intriguing book, a book that's going to open your mind about the immense amount of things that you can do in the world to enhance your quality of life. Brianna Lambert wrote a book called Created to Play, how taking hobbies seriously grows us spiritually.

**Brianna Lambert** (1:23)
Bye. Bye.

**Ginny Yurich** (1:29)
Hobby after hobby after hobby, all categorized into these different categories of, you know, different things that you might be interested in. Brianna, welcome and congrats on your new book.

**Brianna Lambert** (1:39)
Thank you so much. I'm so excited to get to talk to you about all this.

**Ginny Yurich** (1:43)
And you're also a homeschooling family. You have ducks and a dog, and you live in the cornfields of Indiana. You've been a writer for a bit. Can you talk about being a staff writer? So you've had articles appear in different places. So you are a staff writer for a while, you've been writing for a while, and then this is your first book out in the world.

**Brianna Lambert** (2:01)
Yeah, I started writing when my oldest, who is now 13, almost 14, was just less than a year old and just started online with writing through the things the Lord was teaching me. Then I became a staff writer at Gospel Center Discipleship.
I just continued to write, whether it was articles, and I branched into just having fun with poetry and short stories. And I really dug into that form of play that the Lord instilled in me, and it actually became more of a vocation as well. And that brought us this new book that I'm really excited about. It's been a long process. I've been working on it for the last three years.
And actually, the birth of it was six years ago in an article I wrote. So I'm just finally excited to have people read it and to interact about it.

**Ginny Yurich** (2:50)
Well, huge congrats to you. And what you've done is you've taken all these things that we really love about life, but sometimes we feel like we shouldn't do them, we feel lazy if we're doing them, or we feel the pressure to turn it into a business, and you've put them into these different categories. Like maybe you like to make things, maybe you like to nourish people in the kitchen, maybe you like to move, maybe you're a collector, and you're kind of restoring those things for adults. You know, kids are often doing these things naturally, but then we kind of lose them as we grow up. And so you use this word, I never heard of it, avocation. Did I say it right? Yeah.
Okay, so obviously I've heard vocation.
What's avocation?

**Brianna Lambert** (3:33)
Yeah, so vocation is what we would think about as your primary calling in life. You know, we think of vocation as in what your career is, what you feel. You know, we say pastors are called to the vocation of pastoral ministry, right? Or you're called the vocation of engineering or whatnot. But avocation, actually, it's interesting. We don't use this word very much anymore. But the actual term, avocation, it means a calling away to a different activity. So it's your calling away from your primary vocation, right? To a secondary calling. And I think what's really interesting is that, like you just said, we don't really see hobbies that way anymore. We don't see it as a calling away from a primary occupation. We see it as another additional occupation, right? Something else to make our mission, something else to give us something to make money on, to use to improve our lives, to make us more efficient, to do, do, do, do.