I had just come to the front porch, sat down on my old
wooden box to remove my muddy shoes. As
I looked at the basket full of garden pickings my mind suddenly filled with the
pleasant thoughts of my grandmother, Netti Silva Bauer. It was like she was standing on the open door
threshold of her kitchen; ever reminding me: “wash up, dinner’s on.” With grandma, I can never remember a time her
not announcing, minutes before any meal, “wash up, dinner’s on!” From an early age, my dirty hands were given
a bad rap. Going into my seventy second year, it remains. As
I write, I’m thinking, I was born ready to dig into the mess before me, to imagining a war where I dug a fox hole and getting that Wyoming dirt under my fingernails, taking my shoes and socks off to walk in the mud, feeling its warm, soothing, therapeutic qualities between my
toes. When I think about it further, I’ve
always delighted in life by generally getting it all over myself. And, to this
day, it doesn’t take long before I’m still reminded that dirty fingers and a messy
face is not acceptable, that jumping into mud puddles to experience the rain almost
always comes with a reprimand. Sometimes I’m still scolded or admonished that
finger-painting coming from wiping on my pants or licking the corners of my mouth from biting into a jelly filled doughnut. I'm reminded verbally or with a look that that this is fine for the little ones who have not yet graduated to more
“refined” utensils. Moving from child to a senior adult seems to have involved cleaning
up my act in more ways than one.
The earliest Christian disciples utilized metaphors of
childhood in their letters to newly believing communities. Paul compares one’s
knowledge of God to the process of learning: “When
I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a
child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me. Now we see but a
poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in
part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.” Peter
similarly encourages new believers to grow in love and knowledge: “Like newborn
babies, crave pure spiritual milk, so that by it you may grow up in your
salvation, now that you have tasted that the Lord is good.”
Ruminating, it is easy to read both of these examples and
conclude that the ways of children are behaviors I am being told to out grow. I
admit it is easy to allow my negative perspectives on what is “childish” to
inform the way I receive these exhortations involving what is “childlike.” Yet
far from speaking of childhood negatively, Paul is comparing my current
understanding and vision of God to that of a child’s, which will encouragingly
grow clearer on the soon coming day when I stand before God face to face.
Similarly, Peter is not urging me to grow out of my newborn hunger, but on the
contrary is calling me to grow further into it. In other words, there are indeed
some things in childhood that God would not have me to abandon as I turn seventy two!
