Childlike Faith

I'm sitting at Starbucks, sipping on my free pumpkin spice latte sample and nibbling on the apple fritter sample that came with it. A dad walks in with his two young boys. I can feel the play in their eyes. After they order, the barista treats the older of the boys to one of their coffee themed stickers (the younger boy didn't want one). He gleefully peels back the wax-paper backing and plants the sticker on to his jacket. Under Dad's prompting, he heads to trashcan by the door to dispose of the wax-paper backing. I watch as he playfully tosses the paper in. But then he approaches the can and peers into the depths of its belly. For several seconds he is lost inside this unexplored wonderland.

When was the last time you lost yourself in a trashcan?

For this boy, the world was a giant playland full of adventure and excitement. Do you think God might want more of us to see His creation this way? Think back to your childhood. Think of the games of House or School or fighting imaginary bad guys in your backyard with the big stick you found during yard work that morning (or is that just me?). When did that stop?

Perhaps a better approach: why did that stop? Was it because those things no longer amused you? Was it because your imagination had run out of ideas? Or was it because the world told you it was time to "move on"? Did you ever try to go back and play those games after you had stopped? It was difficult to imagine a new reality after this one had been so well defined, wasn't it? But a true faith requires this sort of imagination. We "can only imagine" a realm of perfection that is only realized after death. We have to imagine the kind of world that God wants us to be creating. We are called to imagine the life that He would have us lead and then to chase after that. We must imagine an infinite and perfectly steadfast, loving and kind God because anything else would be us trying to put bounds and limits on Him and His love. In his book Velvet Elvis Rob Bell says this about our minds and God:

"The moment God is figured out with nice neat lines and definitions, we are no longer dealing with God. We are dealing with somebody we made up. And if we made him up, then we are in control. And so in passage after passage, we find God reminding people that he is beyond and bigger and more."

The truth is that we don't know infinite and boundless in our daily lives. We have nothing else to help us understand that idea. We live in a world with edges and compartments and limits. I'm not saying that God is imaginary, nor that our imaginations can understand Him. What I'm saying is that when we lose the ability to imagine a reality that is beyond our own we lose the ability to understand that God is ununderstandable, that He is beyond what we can know. When we lose track of this fact, we start to worry that science might disprove God. We start to worry about tomorrow. We start to doubt that God can provide. We start to trust ourselves because that is what our reality tells us to do. But how can we remedy this?

We need to return to a childlike faith. We accept our identity as children of God. We need to embrace the idea that our reality is not all there is. We need to be sure of the fact that we are unsure. Like Jon Acuff said in his Stuff Christians Like blog (there's a link in the title), we need to "put aside [our] pursuit of perfection and just color." And maybe with this change of perspective we will be more willing to try new things. Things like talk to that one person you always see at that one place but just keep ignoring. Things like encouraging that girl who has given up on herself. Things like selling everything you own and moving your family of 8 to Uganda to find out what God wants you to do there. Things like listening when you pray. Things like obeying God.

Let's make God's world our praiseground and see what a childlike faith can do in a grown-up's world.

"Unless you accept God's kingdom in the simplicity of a child, you'll never get in."

Mark 10:15 (Msg.)