Childhood’s Secret Garden — PART TWO

When my oldest daughter Tabitha was three years old, she would at times routinely list all the people in her life that she loved.

“I love my Daddy, I love my Mommy, I love my brother, I love Grandmother”… and so on.

Once she had exhausted the list of her love victims, my little girl would add the finishing touch. Just in case she had missed someone:

“I love everybody in the whole world!”

This was not pretense. In the purity of her young soul, there was no conceivable fellow human on planet earth that couldn’t or shouldn’t be the object of her love.

“But how?” queried her love-challenged father. “How can you be so sure? How can you love someone that you don’t even know?”

The question stumped her. What about all those dear fellow humans out there in the big, big world that she had never met? What about all these poor people who could never know the benefits of her lavish affections?

It didn’t stump her for long, however. Her Daddy’s critiques didn’t quell her enthusiasm. She simply added a disclaimer to her all-encompassing proclamation of love.

“I love everybody in the whole world!…except the people I don’t know.“

“I love everybody in the whole world” -Tabitha Rose, age 3

This purity of the soul is what the Father calls us back to, as we stumble through the complexities of adulthood…amidst the hordes of “unlovables” that populate this earth.

“Except you become as little children, you cannot inherit the kingdom of heaven.“

What does that mean? Reams and reams could be and have been written on this profound statement of our Lord.

One thing you can say about a little child, even in their brokenness and selfishness that so quickly becomes apparent, is this: they are who they are. No pretense. No attempt to mask their true feelings. Even their early attempts at subterfuge are comical to us big people who have become so skilled at building facades around our real selves.

But to enter the kingdom of God, Jesus tells us, we need to lay down the grandiosity that we attempt to hide ourselves in. The God who created space, time and matter has no problem seeing straight through the fig leaves.

A three year old’s adorable innocence is borne from naivety. Whereas, Christ calls us to have a childlike spirit alongside a mature and accurate understanding of the world in which we inhabit. Our experiences in life tend to make us adults twitchy and cynical. I’m trying to sort out what this “becoming as little children” should actually look like in real life?

Suddenly I recall the passage in Matthew’s gospel where Jesus is imparting advice to his sheep before he sends them out to minister among the wolves.

“Be wise as serpents,” He told his disciples. “And harmless as doves.”

I think it’s starting to make sense to me.

We can never and should not try to reclaim a three year old’s rose-colored view of the world. In this age, there will be no Eden in which to recline, where danger never lurks, liars don’t lie, and deceivers don’t deceive.

We are however, called to a simple child-like faith in Christ. A tiny doorway which stands stalwart and unyielding, yet still beckoning us to come, to dismantle the facades we’ve carefully constructed, repent of the storylines we’ve repeated so many times it feels true, and strip off the layers of self-assurance that feel so comforting and familiar.

Then step through and follow Him.