Childlike, Christlike

“If your little ones need to wander, please wander with them”

In a practical sense, this request in the welcome section at the front of our order of service at my parish church is simply to try and keep smaller children as safe as we can in a church building with hard stone floors, lots of heavy furniture, and a fair amount of stairs – we want to try to ensure that the toddlers who discover the satisfying noise of pounding up and down a carpeted pew, and the six year olds who play hide and seek with energy the rest of us can only envy alike don’t come to harm, and are looked after.

But also it somehow recognises that we are all little ones in the eyes of God. As the Psalmist says in wonder ‘what are mere mortals that you are mindful of them?’ We are all called and created, despite and perhaps because we are mere mortals to be known and loved.

But how ridiculous and remarkable is it that God who created the universe also created us? How can we even begin to accept such love and knowing?

So often we are caught up in our own heads and our own lives, concerns, duties and responsibilities that this fact – that all of our own innermost, childlike and childish parts are known and fashioned by God – is often forgotten and sometimes actively discarded. And so we too wander.

And there is a deep joy in the discoveries made whilst wandering. By our very human nature we are curious about the world around us. And God, much like the anxious first time parent calls and asks us to wander with them. But wandering can be painful, hard, scary.

So in Jesus God comes to our humanity. God made flesh, God incarnate. A God who in Jesus experiences the joys, the violence, the compassion, and the pain of what living and moving and having our being rooted in God, trusting and anchoring in safe ports, truly means.

May your own wanderings be fruitful. May they be ways to encounter God and one another. May you know what it is to love and to be loved – fully and completely yourself.