I found myself in a conversation today about Sunday school. Very few people in our church are willing to volunteer their time to care for their own children and the children of their fellow church goers. Why this is might be a mystery but then again it might be as plain vanilla ice cream. I have my thoughts on the matter but I will leave them slumbering restlessly in the recesses of my mind.
The real revelation I had during this conversation was the sudden idea that when Jesus reclaims His creation there will no longer be children as we know them today. There will no longer be anyone in bodies that age. There will no longer be any reproduction of people at all. There will be only everlasting life, a reality without time in a new heaven and earth with God as the single greatest focus of His creation. Our human relationships as we know them will fall away. I find that this thought initially causes me distress in my current situation but I know that what God has for us is always perfect and find peace in that very truth.
Right now we are privileged to have been children, and have children in our lives. We live in a culture that calls children an interference to our personal lives and provides any number of convenient ways to store them or even do away with them before they can appear on the scene. The same popular culture portrays adults and parents as literal idiots and families as chaotic and dysfunctional in the music, movies and television shows it produces. To view children in the light of this world is to recognize they are the ultimate parasite. The challenge is to recognize who they are in the eyes of God and the indispensible role they play in stripping us of ourselves and conforming us to the image of Christ.
If we are of the family of God we must see children for who they are and behave accordingly. Children belong to God until they have awareness enough to reject Him. A baby is a gift from God to a couple who have developed an intimate relationship, but they are not the origin of this new life and are best serve to acknowledge who is. Each of us is responsible for a child’s well being just by virtue of their presence in our lives. In as much as we are the sole focus of our creator so much so that He sent Jesus to live with, and finally die for us. We need to follow this example in our own lives. We need to live with, and give our lives daily for the children God has given us in our time and place.
How terribly, then, have the theologians misrepresented God in the measures of the low and showy, not the lofty and simple humanities! Nearly all of them represent him as a great King on a grand throne, thinking how grand he is, and making it the business of his being and the end of his universe to keep up his glory, wielding the bolts of a Jupiter against them that take his name in vain. They would not allow this, but follow out what they say, and it comes much to this. Brothers, have you found our king? There he is, kissing little children and saying they are like God. There he is at table with the head of a fisherman lying on his bosom, and somewhat heavy at heart that even he,the beloved disciple, cannot yet understand him well. The simplest peasant who loves his children and his sheep were--no, not a truer, for the other is false, but--a true type of our God beside that monstrosity of a monarch.
George Macdonald
I hear it all the time. Working with children is a gift. Not true! There is no gift only a sacred responsibility. You were once a child. You have been there yourself. You are in fact no different than a child and to be inept in relating to children is to be equally inept in relating to your peers in matters of sincerity and openness. We are all truly called to be servant to the child. They are honest and raw. They forgive easily and love freely. They are transparent and for that reason are certainly intimidating, but they are here to remind us daily of who Christ is calling us to be.
