To Be A Child Again

You are steaming over your favorite cup of joe. Warmth ripples from your stomach to the tips of your toes. Across the street, your neighbor struggles to unload a hundred planks and deposit them in his shed. Contentment exits. Frustration makes a home. Your neighbor’s struggle weighs heavy on your heart and the coffee that once radiated warmth grows cold, cold as ice.

In these snapshots of time, the still small voice of God hardens our hearts and weighs us down, as we repeatedly ignore the promptings of the Spirit. Callouses develop, just like the hardening of the fingertips of a newbie guitar player. At first, we can feel the strings biting our hearts, pricking our conscious, but eventually every feeling is eaten away by termites. We have died to hearing His voice. What is left is a stone cold heart that eventually… kills us.

Excuses come easy. But what if he or she does not want my assistance? But what if he thinks I’m crazy? A neighbor once said, “Nobody cares about their neighbors these days. We live in a different world. What world are you from? Why do you care?” And you know what, maybe it is crazy to care for and befriend your neighbors.

But what if I am from a different world, like an alien from outer space. And what if there is nothing to lose on this earth. What if the commands of God are only burdensome to those who ignore them. Imagine for a moment that you were free from every learned selfish ambition. Free from everything that holds you back from doing the things you know deep down you ought to do.

Yes, imagine you were a child again. Consider this study cited by John Putzier in his book Get Weird. 98% children are considered genius in the area of intellectual originality between the ages of three and five. However, by they reach ages eight through ten, only 38% of them score as geniuses. And, by the time they are high schoolers, only 10%. Finally, by the time they reach their prime at the age of twenty-five, only 2% scored in the genius category. You do the math. God made you a genius and you learned sometime between the ages of three and twenty-five to no longer be genius, hindered by every learned selfish fear.

So, become a child again. Hang upside down if you have to. Think outside the box. Turn the world backwards on its axis. Isn’t that what Christ did when he died on a cross. Everyone around us says, “Super heroes never die. Power does not come through death. There is no life after death. If there is, it’s because I worked for it.” Wrong! Jesus died so that you could think like a child again.

As frightening as it is to do the good we know we ought to do, I can promise you this. Doing good is actually freedom. Every time we respond to the Spirit’s prompting to do good, in spite of everything else in us shouting out, “It hurts!”, we kick away the chains of fear and embrace our Lord and Savior. We choose to live as if this world is not our home. After all, we are just passing through… And honestly, it is comforting to know that Christ is with us, empowering us and shaping us in those moments.

This is my prayer for us all in the words of St. Patrick, “Christ with you. Christ before you. Christ behind you. Christ in you. Christ beneath you. Christ above you. Christ at your right. Christ at your left. Christ when you lie down. Christ when you sit down. Christ when you arise. Christ in the heart of every man who thinks of you. Christ in the mouth of every one who speaks of you. Christ in every eye that sees you. Christ in every ear that hears you.”