Like A Little Child

 For the longest time, I've struggled to understand what Jesus meant when He said that faith meant becoming "like a little child." No, I wasn't quite as dense as Nicodemus when he asked the Christ if being "born again" indicated an adult had to go back to their mother's womb. But it has taken me years to fully grasp what the Lord was after when He issued that statement so long ago. As a child, these biblical stories of Jesus using little children as an example of life in His heavenly kingdom meant that kids like me where accepted and loved by Jesus. There was a simplicity to how I saw it. I was not filled with complex theological, social, and intellectual ideas about what this looked like; I just saw it as an indication that children were special to Jesus. And, at a basic level, that is true: He does love children or He wouldn't have said they were the picture of the relationship He desires to have with us.      

Yet, as the years have progressed and I journeyed into adulthood, I started to better see why Jesus said that becoming like a little child was the way to deeper faith. As we grow through our adolescent and adult years - as we learn more and experience more and struggle more and question more - life begins to take on a more complicated tone. Everything has layers to it and nothing is really all that straightforward. There are tangles of complexities and expectations and opinions and options and differences that play into just living our day-to-day life with the people and situations around us that it starts to become easy to carry that over into our journey with Jesus. We start to dive into deeper truths and intricate verses and knotty issues that take us places we never expected... places that shape who we become, how we think, and how we live. 

But the danger can be that we get so caught up in unpacking all of these elaborate, hard things that we lose sight of that simple picture of falling back into the lap of Jesus and letting Him love us right where we are. We spend so much time trying to understand Jesus that we forget to just be with Jesus. Little children just want to be with you. They aren't trying to have complicated conversations with you all the time; they just want to be close to you and feel your affection. In this labyrinth called life that we're all attempting to navigate, faith itself can even become tricky. When I read some of the social media exchanges on issues of faith practice and truth, it's as though everyone is trying to defend Jesus instead of just be Jesus and be with Jesus. Turning into the most knowledgable Christian has become more important than just celebrating being a Christian in the first place. 

There is certainly a place for tackling the tough, perplexing issues of truth. But this is not the whole of doing life with Jesus. Some of His most powerful moments with His disciples were spent over a simple meal or a walk down the road or fishing on a lake. While some of even the simpler things seemed puzzling to His early followers at the time, Jesus still had moments when He just wanted them to be with Him instead of trying to understand Him. Sometimes it's good to take a doctrinal timeout and just sit in the presence of the One who gave everything for you and loved you to death and back to life. No other human in the history ever did that. Only One. 

Life can be full of confusing things. Solving problems is a lot of what we do on a regular basis at work, in our families, in our communities, in our houses of worship. Being a personal solutions department makes up quite a bit of our daily life. Between helping out our hurting friends, being aware of our loved ones, showing up for work and responsibility, it can get overwhelming to constantly be in the mode of finding answers to complex situations and issues. And soon, we are doing the same with God. We're asking Him to fix stuff - to fix us and those we love - we're asking Him to explain Himself, to reveal Himself, to make us understand the why's to everything when Jesus is just sitting there saying, "Come... climb into my arms. I've already revealed myself. I've always fixed everything because I rose from the dead. I may not have told you everything and everything may not make sense, but does it have to? Is your relationship with Me dependent on always having to know it all before you can trust Me?" 

When He told us to become like little children, I don't think He meant for us to become childish but rather, childlike. Childish people behave immaturely; childlike people exhibit simple faith, trust, submission, maturity. Jesus knew our lives were become complicated and we could start to treat faith like that, too. So He said that we needed to return to that picture of a little child: free, open, imaginative, hopeful, relaxed, present, accepting. We needed to stop making faith this world of practices and programs and disagreements and fights and differences and get back to being in awe of God. We needed to stop focusing on trying to make everything make sense in the life of faith and start believing and living out what is already plain. Sometimes we can't see the forest for the trees. We get so off in the weeds about particulars that we stop sitting like Mary at the feet of Jesus and just gaining by observation like most children do. 

"Be imitators of God, therefore, as beloved children," wrote the Apostle Paul in Ephesians 5:1. Kids copy everything they see their parents doing. We need to start doing the same. We don't have to always pick apart every little theological and social argument and making our lives about winning arguments of faith for God. We need more spending time with God. Get off the phone for awhile and just go sit somewhere and ask God what He wants to say to you. Stop talking to God so much and just listen. Stop trying to understand Him all the time and just dive into His arms and let Him love you. The more you watch Him and copy Him, the more like Him you will become.