A Child's Wonder

Then this weekend De and I had our niece and nephew stay with us. It's hard to appreciate how much time kids take when you really want to invest in them. We were busy with the laundry and the cooking and the dishes and the bedtime prayers and the baths, of course, but also with the deeper things of going after their hearts, discovering what it is God has made deep within them, teaching them through stories and adventures and leading them to explore the world and learn from what it has to teach them.

We played video games for awhile, but then we needed to go outside to where the adventures are far larger. We went on a hike through prairie grasses to a small lake. We ventured around it and into a dense forest full of thick undergrowth. Through that we found an old abandoned mining community. We broke glass from an old building, read graffiti on the walls (I censored it), walked across unstable floorings and loose bricks, wondered aloud what this machine used to do and about what function that portion of the fallen building must've been used for (we agreed it had to be the chamber where they tortured the bad guys for information). A large chat pile in the distance was Mount Kilimanjaro (we had already made the unsuccessful attempt of climbing it a week ago, when we abandoned the attempt after we nearly lost our tracker due to a rock avalanche). Next to it was its smaller mountain-cousin we called Mount Shasta.

In those couple of hours, we backpacked across the island-continent of Australia, trudged through the harsh heat of the Kalahari, and sailed past the dreaded Isles de Muerta. We came across swashbucklers, stomped as giants on ant-sized villages, and proved to ourselves that there was something greater in us than in the challenges we encountered in the tall grasses and weeds and mud and rock.

Especially for my 9 year-old nephew, he learned something about himself: that these circumstances not only arouse something in him to come through and, when he does, proves that he has what it takes to do so, it also shows him that he was made for adventure, made to both conquer and be conquered (by One greater than he).

And how good it was for my heart. At one point they pointed to ruins of an old bridge and with the wide-eyed wonder of children not yet exposed to the cynicism of adulthood, they exclaimed, "There is history here. This was here long before we were!" They said it with that sense of amazement and excitement that took me back and I thought, "It's true. The gospel is written in our hearts long before we hear it with our ears." In fact, I have a suspicion that we only encounter the gospel in our hearts, and all that the best hearing of it can do is to take us back again to that place we knew of when we were young, yet beyond it. I lose too often that sense of wonder and abandoned belief and simple delight. Here I stood leading these two beloved children further into the gospel, and all the while they are teaching me to recognize it as it comes.