Dr Bruce Manners
Senior minister
Avondale College Seventh-day Adventist Church
I’ve just spent the weekend with four of my favourite people—our son and daughter-in-law and their two children. Although some work got in the way, it was good to catch up with them again.
The children, Talyah and Zachary, are almost seven (in two weeks, she reminded me) and five. Talyah has discovered Sudoku puzzles and is quite good at them. Zachary has discovered he’s the fastest runner in his school for his age. They’re different, but they both laugh at my jokes. Grandpa jokes work with this age.
They were excited with our coming. They insisted on being at the airport to meet us (Mum had to stay at home so we could fit in the car). They wanted to tell us about everything. They wanted to show us everything (they’d shifted house since we’d last seen them). Then they simply wanted to be where we were.
They reminded me—again—of Jesus saying about becoming like little children to enter the kingdom of heaven (Matthew 18:3), and I wondered whether I matched up.
How often do I get excited about God, and about telling Him of the good things that happen, or is He stuck with listening to me talk about the bad things and how He should fix them?
Children have a sense of awe and wonder about simple things. I think there are times when we need to drop our sophistication and cynicism to appreciate simple things.
Life is serious, but they were teaching me about the role of imagination. Walking along a trail and Zachary became a David Attenborough pointing out markings on trees. His narrative wasn’t strong, but his play-acting was. It was fun.
Then there were lessons in trust—they trusted their parents, and us, and they had a simple, but real trust in God.
You can learn a lot from kids.
Tags: Bruce Manners