dandelions

this is something i wrote a while back in response to a bible excerpt put before us to contemplate on one of the UCC's internet forums. it's just another way of thinking of the point i was trying to make yesterday with my boys and their coloring...so i thought it deserved a place here:

“..Jesus said, ‘I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and the intelligent and have revealed them to infants; yes, Father, for such was your gracious will.’” (MAT 11:25-7)

When I read this passage, I can’t help but think of my own two boys. One is almost 3 and the other is 15 months old and they do nothing but teach me so much about what I fail to miss in this world. When my oldest sees a dandelion growing in the green midst of our lawn, he just HAS to stoop down, mesmerized by the tangy bright yellow interrupting all those grass blades. He sees a ‘boootiful fower!’ (to put it in his words). But as an adult, all I see is a nasty weed messing up my yard. And I think that speaks to the fundamental difference between kids and adults.

Kids appreciate things as they are. They are not worried about diagrams or schedules or patterns; they don’t try to force the rest of the world to fit into their own prescribed boundaries. They let life spill out all over them. They scream when they need to scream. They crack up in unbridled laughter when they find something funny. They are not worried what other people think of them. They have not yet acquired the self-consciousness and the obsessive need for control that adults are always constantly railing against.

In the eyes of children, everything is new and fascinating and has its own gifts to bring—and that’s all that matters. As adults, we get so bogged down into categorizing and theorizing and over-thinking and needing to know how and why and when and where. Children have not yet lost the ability to see miracles for what they are—and those miracles can take the tiniest form—a butterfly landing on a window pane; the ripple caused by underwater toe-wiggling; wind kicking the leaves back onto the path that leads to your door. When we see leaves on our sidewalk, we think ‘oh great now I gotta get the rake again.’ But a kid thinks ‘yay, it’s crunching time.’ A dandelion sends me into the shed digging for the weed-b-gone, but before I can even find the bottle, my son has already plucked it from the grass, completely enamored of all those gorgeous colorful folds. It causes him no stress. It’s yet another opportunity for discovery. And maybe that’s part of what Jesus is getting at when he mentions those infants.