The Faith of a Child

My daughter is wonderful. I love the way she looks at everything with absolute awe and wonder. She's really into the moon and stars right now. Whenever we go outside at night, she starts looking around for them. She knows the signs, so whenever she sees the moon, she starts moving her little hand in a circle. Sometimes we blow kisses to the moon, and I tell her that one reason God put the moon there is because he knew how fascinating Annabelle would find it.

The cool thing is that it's rubbing off on me. I find myself being fascinated by things that have, for a long time, been mundane. Part of it is that I wonder what it is that my daughter finds so fascinating about these things (apart from the fact that she hasn't seen whatever it is thousands of times like I have). That helps.

I really don't want things to become routine. I don't want to be a robot. I know that I have been like that. I see people like that all the time. Some of my students, as young as they are, have had all the thrill and wonder of life either beaten out of them or drowned by material wealth or suffocated on the vine... sometimes it seems like we train people to be callous toward how amazing life is. One time, I took a bunch of sand to school with me and encouraged the students to play in it. For a while, they responded almost like I had asked them to speak martian. The idea that they would play with sand, especially at school, was so foreign that they literally didn't know how to respond. But, gradually, they remembered... and it all started to rush back. They PLAYED!

I've been wondering just what on earth it is I expect of believers around here... why it is that I can't be content with a "church home". I want believers around me to encourage me to keep this sense of wonder... this playful, unquenchable, optimistic curiousity... not to get suffocated by the routine of life. I want my daughter to hold on to what she's got and not trade it in for a concern over what the latest trend is or have her spirit crushed by people who want her to be like them.

That's what I want.

posted by Stephen at 3:15 PM | |