Recovering the Child Within….Through Christ

There is a luminosity about childhood. For many of us no other time in life was as full of peace and happiness, even joy, than our earliest years. This, I believe, holds true whether we were raised in religious or non-religious homes. There is something in the very nature of childhood that lends itself to what might be called a natural knowledge of and openness to God. Perhaps it is our innate awareness of this reality that has led adult theologians to speak of an “age of accountability”, the moment when children have their first recognition of the difference between good and evil in their own hearts and first know the need, at least dimly, to consciously receive Christ as personal sin-bearer. Before that moment it seems they have a kind of moral innocence, and with that an innate affinity for God.

Whatever one might believe about “Age of Accountability” theology no one, it seems, is able to retain the carefree nature of childhood into adult life. Often this is because childhood itself became “problematic” when abuse of various kinds or other hardships weaved themselves into our early existence. But even those who were nearly always happy as kids will tell you that life became harder, much harder, as they grew up and the heavy responsibilities of adulthood bore down upon them. It is no surprise, then, that one will often hear parents tell their children to fully enjoy their childhood today….while they can.

Paradoxically, as Christians we are taught to give up “childish ways”, but not childlike faith. Whatever the challenging nature of our mature years we are not to become cynical, disenchanted and doubtful about both the goodness of God and the goodness of the lives He has given us. Rather we are to retain the trust of a child towards our Heavenly Father. The Bible also seems to teach that the capacity for awe and wonder that seems natural during pre- adolescence is not something we can permanently do without, especially when it comes to pondering the divine nature. The question is how do we take this counsel and apply it to our lives in the years between young adulthood and old age? How do we recapture some of the cardinal joys of what some literally call the “wonder years”?

For this author the gateway has been, so far, two-fold: first the conscious grieving of losses I’ve known in both my adolescence and my adulthood and second the seeking of God in nature in the aftermath of that grieving. It as if my heart has finally had enough darkness bled from it by the grieving that I can now look out at the earth and sky and catch glimpses of the earth and sky of my childhood, now three decades behind me. At the same time I sense that the way I perceived reality then and the way I am beginning to perceive it again is, in some sense, also a replacement of the temporal perspective with the eternal. It seems that maybe the sublime awe and wonder I knew 30 or more years ago are exactly the same as I’m rediscovering now and that both are tastes of the reality of God, a reality that stands outside space and time.

I realize that this may sound more than a little mystical. For that I cannot apologize. I’m also realizing that without this kind of “mysticism” my Christian life would continue to be impoverished in a way I’m no longer willing to accept. The recapturing of childlikeness is an incredibly powerful thing and I believe it is God’s will for blessing me at this juncture in my life.

Perhaps He desires the same for some of you forlorn lost children sojourning in adult bodies out there. If so, I hope you might find your own way back to a new childlikeness that incorporates the best of the old and, in Christ, goes beyond it. If you do what you may experience is both renewed faith and a blessed taste of deep Heaven.