This entire column is meant to help prepare you for the quote at the end, my favorite about what it means to be child-like.
It’s one thing to be childish, it’s another to be child-like. Childishness is never good; even for four year olds. But child-likeness is, dare I say it, close to godliness. Jesus reprimands the spiritual leaders of his day, telling them to be more child-like.
Movies like “Christopher Robin“ help us see the value of being child-like, of the clear vision children have into the nature of things.
The best children’s books get to this level; they get past the fox jumping and the dog running and into the meaning of life, the fabric of this drama.
But words like this aren’t something you just read and walk away from. Why do we think we can do that? Just parachute into a text and grasp it…there is a depth that is required to sink into, like a sponge, slowly absorbing, slowly sinking.
Once we sink we can see the world not as it seems to be, but as it is. That level of depth is something I write about a lot.
It’s from one of my favorites, G. K. Chesterton, a British journalist and contemporary of C. S. Lewis. If Lewis was a child-like theologian (I reference you to the Narnia series), then Chesterton was a child-like journalist—clear as a bell, creative and wonderful as a song.
In his book Orthodoxy, he captures the facets of life that don’t seem to make sense. One of which is that even when you think you’re the first person to figure something out, when you look at history, you’ll find you are actually the last.
Brilliant. Humbling. Helpful.
Here it is, my favorite quote, and probably the most helpful set of words we can understand about what it means to be child-like.
“Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, ‘Do it again’; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, ‘Do it again’ to the sun; and every evening, ‘Do it again’ to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.”
This eternal appetite of infancy, if you could bottle it up, would sell for a pretty penny.
The foolish pride of man backs us into a corner of monotony.
The wonderful joy of God uses monotony as a catalyst for joy.
Become a child again, if you have the courage, and you won’t need another self-help book.