A Time to Laugh

We just got back from the store. Isaac picked out his clothes for the trip — a construction helmet, yellow rain boots, and too-small soccer jammies (small enough that his tummy sticks out of them). We went to buy cherries for Daddy’s special homemade Chocolate-Covered Cherry ice cream. We also bought dried beans to make bean bags, macaroni for pasta “art,” and big marshmallows “for camping, Mommy!” And we learned the first step in finding bargains — look for the yellow tags.

While we were getting “gas” for the bus cart in the salad dressing aisle, my heart was warmed. This Mommy couldn’t stop smiling. And every other mommy and grandma that saw him understood too. There he was — that precious preschooler pretending and exploring. He was so unconcerned with the social mores that in 10 or so years might weigh heavy on him. That childlike abandon is precious and heart-warming because it’s so innocent.

I am convinced that that’s why Christ foregrounded children. What a radical move! That oblivious contentment and naive disregard for social mores is why Christ said that a child’s unfettered faith was the stuff of the Kingdom. Our own efforts at salvation (whether the definitive or progressive sort) make as much sense as believing we can fuel up our bus cart with a bottle of Bacon Ranch. Even a child understands that it’s pretend, but somewhere along the way we adults take ourselves so seriously and think that our more sophisticated and highly revered plastic hat and rubber boots make sense (see — even a child knows better!). A complete house of cards.

Spurgeon said it better, I s’pose:

We do not enter into the kingdom of God by working out some deep problem and arriving at its solution; not by fetching something out of ourselves, but by receiving a secret something into us. We come into the kingdom by the kingdom’s coming into us: it receives us by our receiving it. Now, if this entrance into the kingdom depended upon something to be fetched out of the human mind by study and deep thought, then very few children could ever enter it; but it depends upon something to be received, and therefore children may enter. Those children who are of years sufficient to sin, and to be saved by faith, have to listen to the gospel and to receive it by faith: and they can do this, God the Holy Spirit helping them.

The fact is that censorship always defeats its own purpose, for it creates, in the end, the kind of society that is incapable of exercising real discretion.

Henry Steel Commager