THE NINTH EYE TEST

Orthoptics this time. I've been before on one of my visits. I had to do the test where you hold a pointer over some dots.

Today, I was thinking about childhood, in the waiting room. There's a wide table of wooden railway blocks, and engines for pushing along the chunky tracks. Someone had built a suspension bridge and had positioned Thomas on top as though he was racing back to Sodor.

A good percentage of my instinct was to get down and play. This would have been a highlight probably, while waiting when I was small. There would have been a simple joy to a table like that, with its grubby toys and well-worn pieces - the kind of safe happiness that's specifically designed to hide the real world of hospitals and surgeries, and the room down the corridor.

Poking out of a plastic book box was a copy of The Gruffalo. I guess it would have been The Very Hungry Carterpillar back in the 80s, or perhaps The Tiger Who Came to Tea, or Meg and Mog.

As an adult, looking across the half-empty orthoptics waiting room, I saw different angles. These things: the stories and wooden railways, they're distractions. They're peacekeepers and placators in an anxious place. I remember getting annoyed at the dentist once because I couldn't finish the story I'd been reading. Adults don't think like that, do they? They're not there to play.

And yet. There is a table for us in the presence of our enemies. What if it's this kind of table? What if it's a table of railway blocks and plastic stations? What if it's shuttles and dolls and finger puppets and adventure stories? What if our enemies, things like sickness, anxiety, despair, worry - are held at bay by our Father while we... play?

I thought about it all through my orthoptics appointment. The doctor blazed a torch into my pupils, the screen of letters wobbled with the aura. She held up a card and moved it towards me until I went cross-eyed. I was somewhere else.

"We don't stop playing because we grow old," wrote someone famous, "We grow old because we stop playing." I definitely think there's something a lot less silly about play than we imagine. At least, as I imagine. Reason stopped me from playing with the toys in the orthoptics waiting room - but I don't think reason should always win. There's a lot to be said for play: real, creative, imaginative table-fun that leaves worry far down the hall in the hands of the One who holds my world. And I don't want to forget that.