by Matthew Clark | One Thousand Words

There’s a story in our family that doesn’t belong directly to me, but I’ll share it, because my grandmother loved to tell it. It’s really my sister’s story, and it happened when she was probably around four years old. I can guess the time-frame, because she’s five years older than me, and it’s a story that concerns our grandfather’s death about a year before I was born.  

My grandmother was in the kitchen looking out the window at the backyard in Ackerman, Mississippi. She noticed my sister Angela standing near where the big oak tree used to be. Angela was just a little thing, but she wasn’t playing in the yard. She appeared to be engaged in a serious conversation with an invisible presence. Grandmother could see her pointing her finger at someone, clearly addressing this unknown listener. Her animated gestures showed she was making an emphatic point.  

Eventually, Angela came in from the yard, and Grandmother asked her about the scene she’d been observing from the kitchen. “Honey, what were you doing out there in the yard?” My sister’s response was clear and plainspoken, “I was talking to God.” Maybe my grandmother fought off a little laugh at the funny things kids say before going on to ask, “Oh, really? What about?” Again, the response came back clear and simple, “I told God he needed to send Grandaddy back.” Here, I imagine Grandmother pausing for a moment; the death would still have been fairly recent, the sting still close at hand. Maybe her eyebrows knitted as a shadow of sorrow passed over her face, but then she relaxed, curious what this little toddler might come up with to say next. “Oh, you told God to send Grandaddy back? Well, what did God say about that?” For the third and last time, the little four-year-old stated calmly and matter-of-factly as could be, “God said, no, he wouldn’t do that. Grandaddy is with him and he’ll take good care of him.” Even though it wasn’t the answer she’d wanted, Angela had been more or less satisfied with God’s response, it seemed. 

I don’t know that Angela remembers this experience, but it’s been preserved in our family, mainly by way of my Grandmother’s delightful penchant for storytelling. If it weren’t for her, we’d have forgotten that my brother Sam, as a child, famously exclaimed,“Voila!” followed by the knowing aside “That’s chinese, you know.”  

Recently, a friend told me the story of a woman who approached her at church with a curious expression, wondering whether she might ask a sort of strange question. She wanted to know whether my friend’s four-year-old daughter was in the habit of exhibiting any kind of unusual spiritual insights, even if they might exceed the awareness of the child. It turns out my friend’s daughter had asked if this woman was pregnant just a few days before the woman herself discovered that she was. 

I’m not trying to be spooky. That’s not the point. It could absolutely be nothing more than a coincidence. I’d even say, the most likely thing is that it was only that. But, I also had to comment on the story with a big, “Who knows?” Who knows what kind of perception little kids have in those very early years before they’re eyes have adjusted to the world. Who knows what, in their proximity to their origins, they can still see before “these sandpaper eyes [have rubbed] the lustre from what is seen” as the songwriter Mark Heard puts it in his song “Worry too much.”  

Somewhere I think I remember G.K. Chesterton saying that the goal of maturity is to keep childhood’s way of seeing the world, but to draw it up and into the higher capacities of adulthood. For him, these things were not mutually exclusive. The child’s way of perceiving need not be anathema to adulthood, instead it might be one of the keys to it, if the two could be rightly integrated. 

The stories and thought of Tolkien and Lewis seem to me to be working along those lines, asking, “What happens when the child and childhood’s tales grow up together, but do not part ways?” 

And, if we’re on the right track, this mature union is hinted at in the Scriptures. Children and those who can be like them, have line-of-sight above the crowd of grownups to perceive the God-man approaching. From the mouth of babes, we say, and there’s Zaccheus, the old tax collector who remembers how to climb trees again like a kid. Zaccheus was a wee little man, a childlike adult, who climbs the branches of a tree to perceive the approach of the unimaginable from a vantage point above the more seasoned and reasonable heads below. In this case, the man’s shortness opens the way for a higher vision, his low state opens the way for his state to climb. When he gets up there, the humblest of all men tells Zaccheus to come back down to meet God all over again, for God has bent down low to be in the midst of his children. 

Who knows what a man or woman might see, if they were to become like a child? A man might become more man-like, if he were to glimpse the Father’s form through the life of the only begotten Son. A woman might become more woman-like upon contemplating Jesus, from whose wholeness both manhood and womanhood are disbursed in order that the goodness of interdependence might be imaged on earth. 

A friend of mine once said that you have to be taught to disbelieve the gospel. That has stuck with me. Failing to see and believe the gospel is not our natural state, it’s a learned thing. We live in a world that makes obvious things very hard to see. A world where we’ve learned to call evil good and good evil. A world where good and evil are confused, like a field planted with both wheat and weeds that look so much like wheat it’s impossible to sort them out ourselves. We need someone clear-eyed and unconfused, someone who was there before the world’s birth, who still remembers what it was like in its infancy, before the luster was rubbed off. Before, as Chesterton said, sin and unbelief made us old, tired, and closed to the wonders of God’s life in our midst.  

There’s one correction to the formula for maturity I mentioned earlier that is worth mentioning. I said, with Chesterton, that we want to keep the child’s way of seeing, but draw it up into the wisdom and capacities of adulthood. Here, maybe we could make a distinction between the childlikeness we want to preserve and the childishness we ought to be working to leave behind like clothes that no longer fit. Paul says, when he grew up he rightly left childish ways behind, so we know the glorious destination God dreams of for us is not characterized by selfishness, irresponsibility, sulking, naivete, and the like. There’s no room for those in the realm of mature love. 

Yet there is all the room in the world for the characteristics of childlikeness—those of wonder, trust, innocence, delight, affection, deep and joyful desire, playfulness, lack of pretense, and the like. These things, Jesus seems to say, ought to be recovered and magnified in our estimation, so that, as we grow up into the fullness of our Father’s perfect love, we might be both shrewd as snakes and innocent as doves. 

By the power of the Holy Spirit’s ministry in our hearts, we might become mature in Christ’s way of seeing and loving—that as children in the good care of Jesus’ perfect Father, we might grow up to be, not so much big and strong, as wise and innocent. 

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