There was a Time ...

Reflections on Mark 10:13-16

Truly I tell you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it. 

There was a time when I could go to the moon or sail an angry sea or hide from the bad guys all from the inside of a cardboard box.  There was a time when a blanket was all I needed to be a super hero or to build a fort.  There was a time when the whole neighborhood would gather around the back of my house, to the spot in the corner of the driveway, where new gravel was delivered.  All we needed were a few Hot Wheels cars, some Tonka trucks and a garden trowel to build an entire city in one day.  There was a time when my friends and I spent hours and hours in the woods tracking Mr. Brown, the neighborhood nemesis, who hated children and carried a shotgun.  There was a time when I delivered the Gettysburg Address, balancing precariously on the arms of a fire hydrant in my front yard, because President Lincoln’s train was delayed.  There was a time when my best friend and I went on dates with the Mickey Dolenz and Davy Jones riding on the backs of our bikes (remember the Monkees?).  Davy always rode with me.  There was a time when anything was possible.

***************

People were bringing little children to Jesus in order that he might touch them and the disciples spoke sternly to them. 

***************

There was a time when cardboard boxes were for throwing away and blankets were just for keeping warm.  There was a time when the only hot wheels I was interested in where the four wheels of my mother’s gold, Buick Skylark.  There was a time when my biggest nemesis stalked the hallways of my junior high school, armed with words that could really wound.  There was a time when delivering a speech in class made me so self-conscious that I would tremble and stammer and break out in a cold sweat.  There was a time when those I wanted to date, didn’t want to date me and those who wanted to date me, I had no interest in.  There was a time when all the pretend of earlier days seemed silly and strangely shameful. 

Childhood was for play.  Adolescence was to be survived.  And then adulthood came crashing down.  Imagination, long ago replaced by reality, was now but a wistful dream.  Adulthood is the time when cardboard boxes store mementos of my childhood in a dark and damp basement.  It is a time when curling up under my own blanket at the end of long day is the closest thing to free.  It is a time when the reality of owning and maintaining a car or home or anything for that matter is a weighty responsibility.  It is a time when finding my voice and the courage to use it is mandatory.  It is a time when accepting and embracing me, the good, the bad and the various degrees of ugly, is a pre-requisite for relating to anyone; friend, family or foe.  It is a time when how life is takes center stage over how life could be.  It is a time when possibility seems limited.   

***************

But when Jesus saw this, he was indignant and said to them,

“Let the little children come to me; do not stop them;

for it is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs.

***************

Something is lost and something gained when we leave childhood for our grown up lives.  I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t go back to age 5 or 8 or 13 or even 30.  But there is something we know as children that we forget as adults when we trade imagination for maturity.  There is something about imagination that unlocks the kingdom of God in a way that reason cannot.  Henry Ward Beecher once wrote, “The soul without imagination is what an observatory would be without a telescope.”  The kingdom that Jesus ushered in cannot be seen with reason.  Our adult eyes are far more attuned to all that is wrong and broken in the world, but the eyes of imagination, the eyes of children, look beyond what we see.  They see hope when we impossibility.  They see potential in those we have learned to judge.  They see magic and wonder where doubt has clouded our vision.  With God, we are told that all things are possible and so too with children.  Imagination makes it so.

In the apostle Paul’s first letter to the church in Corinth he wrote, “When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways.”   That, I think, is a shame. 

***************

“Truly I tell you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it.”  And Jesus took them up in his arms, laid his hands upon them, and blessed them.