Play Something, Make Something (Analog Adventures #2)

Analog adventures simply mean having fun at the pace of real life. Choosing to add these to our lives means we push away distractions and make space for something deliberate, maybe even slow, and beautiful.

So how do we do it?

Today we’ll talk about how we can make analog adventures by playing something, and making something.

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Transcription:

Hello everyone and welcome to the Gospel Tech podcast. My name is Nathan Sutherland and this podcast is dedicated to helping families love God and use tech. Today, we are continuing our conversation on Analog Adventures and we are looking at two new types, two new categories of Analog Adventures. Category number one is going to be how can we play well or play something? And the second is, how can we make something or make something well using our creative skills God has given us?

The point of this conversation is to look at analog adventures, our non-digital fun and how we can train ourselves, model for our kids, and even raise our kids into a way of enjoying real life at the pace of real life; enjoying the skills and abilities God has given them so that our children, yes, know the wonder of the amazingly well-designed digital outlets they have, their shows, their games, the different tablets and devices they have access to, and they know how to make their own fun. They know how to engage others.

And as we’ll see today, specifically board games is the type of game we’re going to talk about, we’ll talk about sports next week. But the type of game we’re going to talk about is an organized, well-designed game that our children can learn from and engage with and then how can they actually be creative and make their own. So that’s the goal of today’s conversation, that at the end of today, you are going to know both some reasons why it’s valuable to do and you can begin immediately in implementing some of this in your own family. So with no further ado, let’s get this conversation started.

Welcome to the Gospel Tech Podcast, a resource for parents who feel overwhelmed and outpaced as they raise healthy youth in a tech world. As an educator, parent, and tech user, I want to equip parents with the tools, resources, and confidence they need to raise kids who love God and use tech.

Thank you to everyone who’s helped make this podcast possible. Thank you for listening, for sharing, for liking. Thank you for rating and reviewing. That little one sentence review you give us let’s other people know why you like it and the five-star rating allows people to find it when they go searching for resources or it even just pops up. I’ve talked to people who are like, “Oh, I found your podcast because it popped up in my feed.” They’d heard of me before but they didn’t listen to it until it showed up and my face was there on the little podcast cover. That’s why you’re helping us do this, so thanks for doing that.

Today’s conversation is Analog Adventures Part Two, How Can We Make Something and … Or excuse me, it’s going to go in reverse. We’re going to play something and make something. And if you’ve listened to this podcast at all, you know that playing something is near and dear to my heart. I personally am a huge fan of board games. If you don’t know my testimony at all, the quick little soundbite of it would be, 12 years ago I played my last video game after playing video games since I was eight. So 20 years in, the Lord convicted me that I was using my video games for hope, not for fun. I wasn’t playing video games because I had hope, I was using them for hope and I had to set them aside because the Lord asked me to trust Him. It’s been beautiful and board games are something I’ve been able to pick up. Not every board game, there are certainly board games that tickle an unhealthy part of my, I would say, intense personality that has a hard time walking away from things, but a vast majority of board games can be awesome.

So let’s dive in. Two things. Play something, make something. Let’s talk about play something. Why board games? I’ve got five reasons based on research. First, it improves frustration tolerance. This is coming from Regine Galanti, a PhD with Scholastic. Frustration tolerance, you lose in board games. You learn how to handle frustration because they’re not made for everyone to win all the time. Many times you lose. There are games that are intended to be difficult and that’s beautiful, so that’s the first reason. Second is, teaches social skills and pro-social behavior. This is coming out of Mumford from 2005 Pro-Social Behavior. You learn how to take turns, you learn how to follow rules, you learn how to lose well. You learn how to win well. You learn how to express your disagreements.

These are important skills for our kids and when I get to talking about specific games, this works down to three and four-year olds. How do you follow instructions? How do you wait your turn? How do you get the disappointment when someone gets that card you really wanted or that thing you wanted and now you have to delay your gratification because it’s not yours right now and you don’t just get to throw a tantrum. These are real world skills that aren’t built in every form of entertainment. Board games do have them there still.

They develop basic math skills. Ramani and Siegler 2008, and again, Schultz, et al, in 2008. Basic math is a part of almost all games. Again, down to three and four. They’re going to be including some general ideas of counting and quantities and greater than less than. Engage critical thinking and develop interpersonal skills, Herrnstein, et al, 1986 and Fall in the Seattle Times, as well. This idea that you have to both deal with the other people, interpersonal skills now, looking at the face. We’re going to be forced into some decisions and that ability to begin thinking critically about what’s my best choice and how do I know is a wonderful way to practice in a safe space like a board game.

Maintain cognitive function as we age. Yes, this is important. This is a 2020 study by Altschul and Deary. You do need something a little bit more difficult than maybe just a Sudoku on your own. This is how do we engage relationally, how do we build interpersonal time and space with eye contact and real voices and physical contact around a single point. I am a big fan of board games. So the question first comes is how do we pick the right board game? I’m going to break it down into three parts because you can do this. By the end of this podcast, you’ll be able to pick board games if you know nothing about them. You need to keep in mind that board games are like food.

First thing that you need to know about board games, you need to be willing, much like food, to take a no thank you bite. You need to try new things. So you’re going to go out there and you’re going to try a game that may not be your cup of tea, but you’re just going to give it a shot. Maybe go to your local board game shop, maybe try a game that a friend has. You don’t have to buy every single game, because you’re not going to play them dozens of times. It’s a great idea to just go try it, here in Washington state, in western Washington, there’s multiple great board game shops.

There’s one in Queen Anne, specifically in the Seattle area, if you’re there, I believe that’s called Blue Highway Games. In Enumclaw is the Cole Street Gaming Vault. Built in an old bank, it’s beautiful. By the way, Cole Street and Blue Highway, well worth just a trip to the area. If you’re ever in general Washington, visit those two board game shops, try out their games. I think it’s like five bucks to rent a table at the Game Vault in Enumclaw and you just hang out and play games. It’s amazing. So give that a shot, try something new.

Second is variety is your friend, excuse me, your no thank you bite is play something even if you don’t want to play it because someone else is into it, you can concede. The no thank you bite is the second piece, try something new. Third is leave time for digestion. You’re going to have to read the rules and it can be frustrating to people who are used to just picking up a game and button-mashing. If you want a little pre-digestion, the idea that you might cook a vegetable before you eat it, in the case of a board game, awesome tutorials. I’ll give you some both in the show notes, but I’ll list them later. Some phenomenal people have put in a ton of work to do this. I’ve done some tutorial stuff before and these people are top tier, so I’m just going to send you to them.

Finally, great games, like great meals, are best enjoyed with great people. That’s part of the enjoyment and the fun because that is the end game here, we are trying to enjoy ourselves and have fun. So how then, if that’s what we’re going to do, if we’re going to remember, games are like meals, they’re enjoyed with people. You’re going to try new things, you’re going to take a no thank you bite and you’re going to go with other people’s ideas. I’m forgetting one. Oh, we’re going to leave time for digestion. If we want help with digestion, tutorials are helpful. Remember that, board games are like great meals. Let’s just go out and enjoy the experience.

Now, I want to pick a game. How do I do it? Made an acronym called an ANTIC. The idea here is if you’re going to pick the perfect game, you’re going to need to know your audience. First, you need to know the age. If you’re picking for six to 10-year olds, that’s different than if you’re picking for 20 to 30-year olds. How many players? Two players, four players, eight plus? How much time you’re looking to invest here, 30 minutes or less? That’s a very specific group of games versus an hour or more, or I’d say, an hour to two and then kind of the two plus. You’re going to find a lot in that 60 to 90 category when you go to games for older kids.

And then when it gets to adult games, it’s three-plus hours and you’ll have to decide. And if it says three hours, it means three hours. You’re not going to rush this well, so just keep that in mind. And then finally, what interests do they have, or not finally, excuse me, there’s two more. Interest as in like do they have a specific topic they like? They like World War II, they like Pokémon, they like traveling. Do you want to do that and then is it cooperative or competitive? That will be the final piece. So once we have our ANTIC down, we know the age, number, time, interest, and whether we want it to be cooperative or competitive, then we’re going to look at what games are even available. I would send you to boardgamegeek.com. You can simply Google it or check the show notes.

And there’s four categories. I’ll put the links there for you to check out. It’s family games, strategy, party, and best overall. They basically, you can click family game and it’ll show you here’s the top a hundred family games as rated by the thousands of users on Board Game Geek. Just know that board game players are pretty intense and that means that their rating system is a really, really, really good game. Probably one of the best ranked on there is going to be like an 8.5 and then some of my favorite games are six and a half to seven and a halves and still good games are in the low sixes to the fives that you might just like because it’s fun for your family. So don’t take this as it’s ranked high, therefore I need to buy it. It’s something for you to check out.

When you visit one of those board game shops, you can ask the people there or ask if you can play it or just simply rent a table and play if your local game shop allows you to do that. If you don’t know or you want some help with pre-digestion, you have a game you want to play, now you know where you can go. I mentioned tutorials, two spots I would send you. The first is Watch It Played. This guy’s been doing tutorials, I think, for eight years and does an awesome job. It’ll be about eight to 10 minutes to learn how to play just about any game that’s out there. If however, you’re like me and you just want to hear the rules once really fast, you go to the Rules Girl on YouTube as well, and this is three to four minutes, good visuals, but the rules come really fast and it just gets you through it once so you kind of know it’s like the Cliff Notes, but she doesn’t cut any corners.

She gives you all the rules, but she doesn’t belabor the point, she doesn’t repeat anything. It’s just going to come through one time really fast and it’s great. So I included links for, let’s see, for Watch It Played, excuse me, I did Wingspan. And for The Rules Girl, I did code names as examples of why their tutorials are really top notch and they deserve all your subscriptions and views and friends knowing about it. So now, we know why board games, we know that it’s like a good meal and how we’re going to kind of set our mind on doing this deliberately. It doesn’t have to be every night, it doesn’t have to be for six hours of time. You don’t have to play Risk or Scythe or any other game, Twilight Imperium that might take days of your life away. Instead, you’re going to pick a game that fits your family’s antics and you’re going to use helpful, trusted resources both the tutorial side and something like Board Game Geek to look up great games.

All right, so now if I were to just pick a single game from each major age group to play, I broke these down for myself based on the age of my kiddos and the middle schoolers that I was using games for in board game club. Here’s what I would say. If you had a single game to play for a three to four-year old play Animal to Animal by HABA, H-A-B-A, it’s basically Jenga with little wooden animals. It teaches you. You roll a dice, the dice tells you what to do, so now you’re following rules and then it’s the hand-eye coordination of setting an animal on another animal and that there’s right and wrong actions to take on your turn. Hadley and I have played that since she was three. Sometimes we follow the rules, sometimes we don’t. Sometimes we just roll the dice because it’s fun to roll the dice and then you just place an animal. Again, the point here is to have fun, it’s not to be super persnickety about all the rules. This might be a chance for us as parents to relax a little. So that’s three to four.

Five to six, Outfoxed has been a great game. It’s kind of like Clue, but for little kids and it’s a fox who stole a pie not as murdering the chicken, so it’s thematically appropriate for young kids. Maybe you like your young kids to play Clue, but some people are concerned about the whole murder situation. So five, six, Outfoxed. How do we find it together? It’s a cooperative game. You can lose. Basically on certain dice rolls, the fox moves a certain distance. You’ll have to see, that may not be the best explanation, but look it up on one of those tutorials and you’ll see the visual.

Seven and eight-year olds, Downforce. It’s a Formula One racing game and it’s super fun. It’s very easy, but that doesn’t mean it’s simple. It has some complexity to it. I’ve played it with five and six-year olds. I’ve played it all the way up to college students and my nieces and nephews as well as my adult friends. Actually my last birthday, I got together with a bunch of my former college buddies and we played into the wee hours of the morning and I think there were three full rounds of Downforce. I will say there’s a, shall we say, guessing component to this.

There’s three different spots on the racetrack as you go that you’re going to guess who will win. It might say the word bet, but it’s a guess. You’re taking an educated guess. Again, critical thinking. Just make sure you know that’s there and you can have the conversation with your kids. I literally call it guessing with my kids. I say, you know we’re not going to be betting, but we’re going to take an educated guest based on the cards you got and where people are, who do you think is going to win? That’s how we handle that. You can do it as you’d like.

Nine to 10-year olds. Dice Throne is basically combat Yahtzee. The initial set I would encourage you to get is the Cowboy verse Samurai because who doesn’t want to … It’s like that Discovery Channel, I think it was or History channel where they would do the warrior verse warrior thing. So it’s that, but it’s just Yahtzee. You roll your five dice and you get special abilities and you fight one another. It is combat, so know that and there are some mystical elements if you go into the other characters. There’s what would effectively be a Buddhist monk. There’s a Paladin. There’s some scarier characters. It’s like a vampire person, not a set that we use, but just know that it’s out there. If you’re more comfortable with the Marvel Universe, same rule set, but you can play as Thor. So if that’s interesting to you, check that out that, but it is highly engaging, a lot of fun, a lot of probability work.

If you’re a homeschool math folks, you can get into some deep weeds on that depending on the, oh, that’s the other thing. Complexity can vary and they’ll show you on the box if this is like a one out of six or a six out of six on how complex the character is, and I want to say the Samurai and the Gunslinger or the Cowboy are two and three out of six.

So ages 11 to 12, the game I picked is Dixit. It’s basically apples to apples with pictures. There’s a single word or a phrase I might say, hero, and then everyone lays down a card they believe best represents hero, but everyone’s trying to guess which card is mine out of the stack and if some people guess it, but not everyone, I get points. Very difficult and frustrating and super funny, so check it out. And then 13-plus, if I had to pick a single game for you to play at your home with a 13-plus it would be Wingspan. And I say that because there’s a lot of great games and I just want to list 12 of them, but Wingspan is beautiful artwork, super fun facts. There’s actually a book out on the Wingspan artwork with more details on all the birds, but basically you’re building an aviary. You’re building homes for wild birds and there’s forests and there’s grasslands and then there’s marsh and water and you’re trying to get birds to come and nest and the more birds you get, the more eggs they have.

And then there’s certain parameters like varieties of birds you have. It’s fun, it’s complex. It certainly can be highly competitive, but at the end of the day it’s just beautiful. Sometimes my kids just pull the game out and look through the cards because the cards are gorgeous and they have fun facts on them. So I would say Wingspan is one that really draws us towards wonder and just generally being an impressive and well-made game.

So those are some games I would say to play from three to 13-plus and there’s others. I [inaudible 00:16:28] nerd out on this in a long time, but that’s board games. Check them out and play them with your kids. Pick one day a week, an evening a week, pick 30 minutes that you’re going to play a game. Do it with your kids or just encourage them to play on your own. When we do those quiet times, to find those times when we’re just going to unplug for a little bit and hey, we’re going to do something independent. So then we’re going to go to make something, we played something. Let’s talk about making something.

I want to focus specifically on the physical creative act of art, with drawing, painting, and coloring. So if we’re drawing Art Hub Kids on YouTube, use, please, an ad blocker or buy the premium version of YouTube if you’re going to be sending your kids on there because ads will pop up and we’re not in control of what those are. So find a way to protect your children in that. And when they go on there, you can do this with them, but Art Hub Kids, it has free resources. There is a premium version, but there’s free resources. You can buy them thematically, there’s Jack of Lanterns that you draw, color, fold and then when you pull it open, the Jack of Lantern’s mouth opens.

There’s intensity that allow for five and six-year olds to do it, but also for 15 and 16-year olds to still find something challenging and interesting. Art Hub Kids is awesome for drawing lessons and teaching you actually showing you and then teaching you how to actually learn how to shade and how to create depth and how to make just fun images. So for someone who’s not an artist, it’s been a lifesaver. Painting, certainly painting with watercolor and using tutorials like I talked about with Art Hub Kids, but also painting with one thing we found is a lot of fun is finding a game that has little miniatures and you spray paint them with a primer. I don’t do anything fancy. You get a gray primer from Lowe’s or Home Depot. It’s like $8 for a can, I think, and it lasts for hundreds of these things and we then paint the game pieces of a board game that we enjoy.

So this might be Mice and Mystics, this might be, what’s the game they’ve been doing? Oh, Battle Tech. Little robots that they really enjoy painting and Hadley does these. She just gets purple out. We have a bunch of purple little mechs now that we use. But whatever the board game is, if it has miniatures, you can prime that thing and you can paint it. Imperial Assault is a Star Wars game that we’ve got. You can prime those and paint them and they can be as accurate as you want and there’s a skill in that or you can just paint them because it’s fun to paint. So whether you’re painting scenery and happy little clouds or miniatures in a game, go ahead and jump in. There’s no wrong way to do it. I will say we use Vallejo paints if you need a paint company. That’s V-A-L-L-E-J-O, and they do a great job of creating a really easy paint dispenser.

There are some paints that are like, why is this so punitive that I’m trying to use your product and just know you can put them on a paper plate, you can add one drop of water to make it a little more fluid. The viscosity matters and there are some great tutorials on YouTube on how to paint well if you’re interested. Finally, coloring pencil lessons. How do we make shapes? How do we make designs? How do we shade in different ways? Anna, who’s the artist of our family, actually found a great one for the kids called Creative Form Drawing by Angela Lorde, does basically, like this lesson, we’re going to just practice this particular skill and the kids love it. So if you’re interested, again, it’s Creative Form Drawing by Angela Lorde. It is the actual pencil lesson. So that’s three ways we can draw, we can paint, we can color.

And in this case, you can color in the lines, you can color with a workbook. Hadley just got her first workbook for following lines and making letters and she’s in pre-K. And we’re like, yeah, let’s start this process. That absolutely counts. Then you can build. Build with Legos either with instructions or without. Build with Duplos. If your kid is too young for Legos and it’s not safe and they keep putting them in their mouth, Duplos are just bigger. Build with Magna-Tiles. They’re expensive, there are off-brands. But I know that in the last four years we’ve had Magna-Tiles, we did three Christmases in a row that we asked for a set of Magna-Tiles. We just put them in a giant bin we found, I think, a target for $12. We found a giant bin that we just dump them into. Sometimes it’s in a closet while the kids are playing with Duplos and then the Duplos go in the closet and we bust out the Magna-Tiles.

Nine, seven, and four is the age of our kids and they still enjoy both and we’ve exactly broken one Magna-Tile in the last four years and it just broke. And Hadley definitely just two foot jumped onto it while it was stacked on other things. So if you choose to invest in that, they’re not cheap, the actual brand Magna-Tiles, but so far they’ve been intensely durable. So check it out if you want. You don’t need to get the fancy ones that are like in the shape of forests and have special textures. But the reason they’re cool is kids can free build structures and then when they build with them, they can create stories with them, which is our next piece. But other things you can build with is just straight up blocks. If you have scrap wood around, there’s a great project in sanding that and chopping that and making basically giant Jenga building blocks.

You can buy custom blocks for that, but having blocks of some variety that lets your kids just go build and stack. And Snap Circuits would be the last thing I would add. Snap Circuits is a brand of basically building little electronic circuits. They’re very simple sometimes. For 25 bucks, you can buy a set that has 10 examples you can build for building a circuit. How do you complete a circuit? What are the rules of that? And then they get more intense as they go. I mentioned telling stories and that’s where I’ll take this next one is, you’ve built something and that’s great. The building process is fun. The way the kids build with Magna-Tiles or Duplos when they’re free-building or Legos. One of my nephews is incredibly gifted. Actually, several of my nephews are incredibly gifted with just free-building Legos. Super cool. That’s wonderful.

And once you’ve built them, you now get to tell stories, build a story. How can we make a narrative out of just the Lego pieces? Out of the Lego pieces, the little characters now joined with our Magna-Tile town that we built, now built with our Hot Wheels that we’ve got. This idea of cross-playing is powerful. Kids make meaning out of it and it’s absolutely something that’s accessible to a wide range of kids and a great way for kids to play together. Sometimes it’s hard for a nine-year-old to play with a four-year old, but this is something they can both do. And yes, kids rage because one kid’s going to use Godzilla car to smash the other kid’s building. Now, we get to talk about treating others the way we want to be treated. It’s a teachable moment. Don’t shy away just because there will be conflict. Understand that that’s important part of building stories together. It can be frustrating when things don’t go your way. So make stories, toy kitchen, stuffies.

I mentioned little independent Lego pieces like the characters can be great and there absolutely is a place for recording this on some kind of a device like your phone, you can use Guided Access. I included a link to what that is. On an iPhone, Guided Access locks your kid into an app. It means they can now record on your phone and not get into the rest of your innerwebs. They can then use that. You can upload that to a computer and they can use editing software to make a film. Maybe it’s stop animation, maybe it’s just a film that they’ve made with all of their lovely things like certain family members that I’m related to grew up pretending to be news anchors. Or like my own family, with my four sisters, I have a lot of documented recordings of skits we put on and typically I’m wearing angel wings of some variety. So heads up, that stuff is out there, but make a story.

Yes, you can absolutely write it. I mentioned that at the beginning to write a narrative and to create one together mad lib style where you fill in the blanks or you create a single line or a single word. There’s lots of silly ways to build stories that can be a lot of fun. And finally, I would say bake and cook. When we make something, we can make something we can eat. This time of year, amazing options. It can be as simple as buy some apples, make sauce. Applesauce is so simple, you don’t actually have to add anything. You can sweeten it with a little bit of sugar. You can add some cinnamon, but all you really got to do is peel it and not even everyone peels them.

If you want a peeler, you can get a Johnny Appleseed peeler from Amazon. It’s 30 bucks right now. Do it. It’s a great gift for someone this Christmas. It literally just has a suction cup, sucks onto your table and you just grind the apple through it and it cores it, peels it, slices it. You can use that to make apple pies. That’s another go-to this time of year. Sure, you can do pumpkin pies and other things, but the apple pie we’ve been making right now, and yes, right now meaning we have made multiple of this thing. I think Anna’s made like four apple pies since the beginning of September. Thank you, Tara, by the way, my sister has hooked us up with a massive box of apples from eastern Washington, so thanks for that. But America’s Test Kitchen has a book called The Perfect Pie.

I got it for Christmas a couple years ago. Do it, get it for someone for Christmas and make pies part of your just family rhythm that once a month you’re going to bake a pie or once a week or every other day. I don’t know how often, but they do take some work. It has to be deliberate. It’s hard to bake a pie fast. It’s a great opportunity to make something, enjoy it together and have it be a process and a journey.

And then finally, so you can bake and I would make something like applesauce, make something like an apple pie or a pumpkin pie or any other the hundred pies from that book. And by the way, the book has all sorts of little cheat codes on how to make your pie crust flaky and delicious and how to make the insides. We make the Dutch Apple Pie where you soak the apples first to help them get all amazing and delicious and we make a dairy-free version. We just adapt it. But you can do however you want. They actually tell you to put it in ice cream and you just let the ice cream soak in for a couple hours. But I digress.

Radish is a subscription program basically where you can pay monthly to have them send you recipes for cooking and baking. We’ve used this, and we don’t use it every single month, but you can get it for basically 30 bucks. You get a one-off. It can be thematic, like we want this for Halloween-themed or Thanksgiving-themed or ready for Christmas. You can choose just desserts and breakfast stuff or you can choose all the meals. And it basically comes with some cool little tools. It’ll come with an apron, comes with a special whisk that’s kid-sized. And then usually three meals that they can make and the meal will include like here’s the appetizer, here’s the core thing, here’s the dessert for this meal. Worth taking a shot.

If you have a budget for that or if you plan it into your budget, hey, each month we’re going to spend 30 bucks on the kids. One month we’re going to buy a game. One month we’re going to buy a subscription, like a Radish thing. One month we’re going to do something else, some kind of fun activity. That’s one way to do it. Certainly budget in and make sure you’ve got the time and the space and the priority to participate in these. But know that these are great ways to engage in making things, because at the end of the day, reading instructions and doing fractions with measurements is valuable or measuring by grams if you’re into that. Also valuable, building and creating story and being collaborative is valuable. And understanding how to take our internal inspirations and make art with them is an important part of how we’re made.

We are designed to create and we are given a purpose, but in that purpose we’re allowed to celebrate God and God’s designs. I personally believe this is an act of worship. When we create, well, when we do it because it’s an extension of what God’s put in us. And we’re not doing it simply for self-satisfaction and glorification, we’re doing it because we can do it, not because we want to make money, but because it brings joy. And in experiencing that joy, it’s something God’s given us to enjoy, we glorify God.

And I don’t want to oversimplify worship to just as long as you’re out enjoying yourself, you’re giving God glory. But there are ways we can do this deliberately and we can point it out to our kids. That, son or daughter, God gave you this gift and that’s beautiful. Did you enjoy that? When you enjoy that and you’re thanking God for the ability to enjoy this thing, you’re glorifying God because it’s something He gave you to enjoy because He’s a good Father and He’s given you a good gift. Let’s tell our kids that. Let’s help them make things on purpose because it’s beautiful.

So what can we do for Analog Adventures in this next week? We can play something and we can make something. Just pick one. We talked about so, so, so much. But pick a game to play, it can be Uno, it can be any game you want. You can remember that it’s like a meal. Include people, check out your ANTIC, what’s a good fit for your audience? And go to something like Board Game Geek and look at it and then make something. Make a story. Make a piece of art. Make something other people can engage in and be a part of because it’s going to be a blast. And remember that when you do all of this, it’s because you’re fearful and wonderfully made, that God wired you for it, and you can try something new and realize that even stuff you’re not good at can still be fun because you’re learning and growing, and God made you to do those things and to see Him in and through it.

I hope this was encouraging and helpful. If it was, would you please consider sharing it with others so that they can learn and grow from this process as well? And will you join us next week as we continue this conversation about how we can love God and use tech.