Sacred Scribbles

“He called a child, whom he put among them, and said, “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.” Matthew 18:2-3

I’ve always felt more comfortable hanging out with people who are older than me. Growing up, I was one of the very youngest of my cousins and of the people in my neighborhood. Maybe my tendency to draw nearer to adults can be contributed to these things, or maybe it is a result of just some aspect of my personality. Either way, I was always the first person to get up from the kids’ table, even as early as 5 years old, and go sit in my parent’s lap. Their conversations were just better in my eyes. I still sometimes get uncomfortable around young children—I feel as if they don’t like me and I don’t quite know how to interact well with them. In contrast, my mom’s passion is teaching elementary and pre-school, and my sister’s face lights up when she sees an infant in public, her primary summer job is babysitting, and she excitedly anticipates having many children of her own one day. I wish I could relate. I admire children’s pastors and my co-op intern peers this summer that are working in children’s ministry. I truly believe that there is so much holy activity in building relationships with young children. But it is not my strong suit, and I’ve been working on being okay with the fact that being in charge of humans much younger than about middle-school age gives me anxiety.

I say all this to illustrate how I am the last person in the world you should expect to write a blog on childlike faith. But as I am continually reminded, God is crazy. 

This summer, the entire Church Leadership Co-operative community (staff, mentors, interns) has set aside Tuesday afternoons for a time of deep theological reflection and discussion. Our Zoom meetings are challenging. They cover advanced and mature topics. They are not concerned with easy-to-answer questions or easy-to-comprehend answers. Similarly, the group I work with at Galloway UMC frequently delves into high-stakes topics by sharing perspectives and engaging in thoughtful introspection. While these conversations do feature very complicated concepts and a lot of theological “mumbo-jumbo” (even after 3 years of taking undergraduate theology classes, there’s still some terms I’ve never heard of), I recently came to realize how these conversations are, at the core, childlike. Like I said, I am no expert on child development. But isn’t that what children do? Inquisitively wonder at the world around them? Seek to understand why things are the way they are? And go to their parents for guidance when their curiosity takes over? (I was in an orthopedic walking boot for a couple weeks recently and twice in public I overheard something like “Mom, why does that girl have that on her foot? Did her mom give her that?”)

When I read that verse in Matthew, sometimes I think it means to just blindly trust God as our Father in the way that most children blindly trust their parents. To look at Him with the same uncorrupted, starry-eyed wonder and excitement that a newborn exudes when her mom picks her up from pre-school in the afternoons. That may be part of it. But I think there is also something to be said for maintaining your desire to learn and growing to imitate and reflect your most beloved guardian. (When I was little, I loved my mother’s dresses and wanted to put them on so desperately. What would it look like if we felt the same way about our Father’s outfit—Jesus’ humble swaddling clothes or the belt of truth, breastplate of righteousness, shield of faith, helmet of salvation, and sword of the Spirit from Ephesians?) In my opinion and experience, that learning, growth, and imitation takes a lot of wrestling with what you don’t understand. Grappling and not giving up. Questioning the world around you while using God the Guardian as your guide, and sometimes butting heads with Him in the process. But pushing through and gaining from that deep relational interaction with even more defined sentiments of love, grace, and wisdom.

One of the best physical artifacts that I’ve come to embrace as childlike in my life is my prayer journal. It’s a tiny notebook that is messy, unfinished, jotted all over, and slightly crumbled. This greatly contrasts with my school and work notebooks—I’m usually too neat and organized. However, something is freeing and refreshing about knowing I can come to God in prayer with nothing more than scribbles that may not be legible or coherent to anyone else that reads them. He is in-sync with the deepest groanings of my heart and the subpar expressions of adoration and gratitude that I can offer to Him. It’s just like a child bringing home a sheet of printer paper with multi-colored scribbles all over it, telling her parent she drew a particular object (say, their house), the parent being able to see the resemblance, and then hanging that paper on the fridge. Guests in the kitchen may not understand the significance. But the parent would not only understand the significance behind the messiness but embrace the messiness in itself. Our Heavenly Parent embraces the messiness in us as we grow and make ourselves vulnerable in offering ourselves to Him. So, embracing how my prayers look messy, incomplete, unpolished, and childlike only seems right.

Each of our relationships with Jesus will look different. We will all have different ways in which we can “become like children” at the feet of our Father. But I encourage you to embrace the sacred scribbles in your life this week and open your eyes to how God draws nearer to you as you lay down your independence and self-sufficiency.