THE CHILD IN GOD

My wife and I are very thankful for and blessed because of our grandchildren. We love to have them visit and to visit with them. Unfortunately, given the distance between them and us, time with them does not happen as often as we would like. Even so, when it does happen, we have a wonderful time. We are also quite happy and relieved when they go back to Mom and Dad. We are exhausted. And it all has to do with our ages.

   It’s not that we are old. Well, yes, it is. We are too old to have children. Their boundless energy and enthusiasm is more than we can sometimes endure and surely could not endure on a continual basis. I cannot imagine being the parent of my grandchildren. It almost wears me out thinking about that possibility. I can take them in doses, small doses at that.

   It’s not that I get tired easily. I don’t have boundless energy to be sure and certainly not the energy I had when we were raising our daughters. The problem is that our grandchildren, like all little children, never get tired. Tyler, our three-year-old grandson, is a whirling dervish. He has boundless energy. He tires me out just thinking about his energy. His motto is “do it again!” And when I do it again, he wants to do it again – and again and again.

   All of which brings me to God the Father – or Mother, if you prefer. It doesn’t matter. In fact I sometimes think we sometimes think of God not as Father/Mother but as Grandfather/Mother: an older person whose age has caught up with her and who gets tired of it all all too easily. Once is enough for Grandmother God. She expended lots of energy creating the world, and now she sort of sits out there watching the world go by. She gets involved as the spirit moves, but not all that often and certainly does not expend too much energy because, again, she tires easily.

   Maybe not. In fact, rather than thinking of God as Father or Grandmother, perhaps we ought to think of God as Child or certainly think about the child in God. G. K. Chesterton wrote this about children and God: “A child kicks his legs rhythmically through excess, not absence, of life. 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 gotten tired of making them. It may be that he has the eternal appetite of infancy.” — Christian Century, 7/26/05

   And it may be that we adults do not. As with God there is a child in each one of us, a child who delights in doing it again, of seeing the sun come up every day and the moon rising every night, who never tires and is never bored. Perhaps we have allowed that child to die. Perhaps that child needs resurrection.     WJP