What does vulnerability have to do with greatness? How is a defenseless child a portrait of God? Our reading from Mark's Gospel this week cuts hard against the grain of our obsessions with performance, perfection, achievement, and superiority. In likening the divine to a child, Jesus invites us to relinquish the deep fears we harbor around our own self-worth and value. At a cultural and political moment rife with harmful notions of "greatness," God lovingly offers us another way forward — a way of precarity and smallness. The question is: will we have the courage to receive it?