The Eyes of a Child

Hello faithful family, friends, and followers, welcome and thank you for your interest. It has been a rather quiet week for Joy and I, but significantly eventful within our family and certainly for our nation and the world as a whole. New challenges, new threats, and increasing uncertainty can feel very harsh, foreboding, uncertain, and if nothing else exhausting.

Last week, I shared the comfort and encouragement Joy/we found in scriptures recording Christ’s valuation of and affirmation for childlike faith and its importance not only for us personally, but as a meaningful and significant representation of the Kingdom of God. Especially for Joy, in her “new normal” of often feeling like she’s coming from a childlike perspective, knowing that there is Christ blessed and validated assurance of such faith, is uniquely heartening for her and both of us really.

It may seem counterintuitive, but I think there is a case to be made for childlike faith being one of the most powerful resources for and best defenses against these harsh, foreboding, uncertain, and exhausting times. Since it must have been at least a week or two since I quoted Frederick Buechner, I’ll share his following insights drawn from Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan, a parable so very applicable to the challenges in our present world whether near or far. Buechner writes:

In Christ’s parable, a third man finally did come along, of course. He looked, really looked, and saw not just a man, a man, but saw what was actually sprawled out there in the dust with most of the life whaled out of him.

He bound up his wounds, set him on his own beast, took care of him, and his reward was to go down in fame as the Good Samaritan, which seems to be a marvelously inept title somehow, because just as I prefer to think of the priest and the Levite as less than really bad, more just half blind, in the same way I prefer to think of the Samaritan as more than merely good.

I prefer to think that the difference between the Samaritan and the other two was not just that he was more morally sensitive than they were but that he had, as they had not, the eye of a poet or a child or a saint—an eye that was able to look at the man in the ditch and see in all its extraordinary unexpectedness the truth itself, which was that at the deepest level of their being, he and that other one there were not entirely separate selves at all. Not really at all. Your life and my life flow into each other as wave flows into wave, and unless there is peace and joy and freedom for you, there can be no real peace or joy or freedom for me.

To see reality—not as we expect it to be but as it is—is to see that unless we live for each other and in and through each other, we do not really live very satisfactorily: that there can really be life only where there really is, in just this sense, love. This is not just the way things ought to be. Most of the time it is not the way we want things to be. It is the way things are. And not for one instant do I believe that it is by accident that it is the way things are. That would be quite an accident.

Can we each be encouraged to have such a view: “…he had, as they had not, the eye of a poet or a child or a saint... to see that unless we live for each other and in and through each other, we do not really live very satisfactorily: that there can really be life only where there really is, in just this sense, love...”

And in love, we will leave you with a few words from our reading in Psalms 55 this week to bolster you against these harsh, foreboding, uncertain, and exhausting times:

Listen to my prayer, O God.

Do not ignore my cry for help!

Please listen and answer me,

for I am overwhelmed by my troubles…

Oh, that I had wings like a dove;

then I would fly away and rest!

I would fly far away

to the quiet of the wilderness…

But I will call on God,

and the LORD will rescue me.

Morning, noon, and night

I cry out in my distress,

and the LORD hears my voice.

He ransoms me and keeps me safe…

Give your burdens to the LORD,

and he will take care of you.

He will not permit the godly to slip and fall. 🙏🏻