 We are pleased to offer a new eight part series on the subject of Childlike Faith by Mike Mason. Mike is a regular contributor to canadianchristianity.com and has edited excerpts from his book 'The Mystery of Children,' inspired by his own journey in parenting. This second 'Mystery' book was a follow up to his ECPA Gold Medallion award winning 'The Mystery of Marriage.'
[other pieces by Mike Mason]
About a month before I became a Christian I had a vivid dream. I saw myself as if I were outside my body and observing me across a room. As I began walking towards myself, I had the beautiful sensation that the two of us were about to merge into one.
But that's not what happened. Instead, as I drew close to my double, the other me began to grow younger, rapidly in a succession of stages, until eventually I was standing before myself as a child of six. Seeing myself so cute and innocent, I experienced an enormous nostalgia for my lost childhood and an overwhelming desire to embrace myself.
But at this point----alas!----the little boy turned away from me, plainly repulsed. He wanted nothing to do with me. Knowing that I was loathsome to myself, I wept bitterly.
The term inner child has long been a buzzword in popular psychology. But what does it mean? I believe the inner child is our spirit. Looking at a child is as close as we can come to seeing the spirit or inner essence of a human being.
Jesus wants us to become like children because childhood is when our spirit lived closest to the surface. In childhood our hearts were the most transparent, most vulnerable, most malleable. Growing up usually means covering up our spirit more and more with flesh. God wants us to become the person we really are inside, the person we were born to be. Becoming childlike involves peeling away the masks to get back to the real, rosy-cheeked, bright-eyed face beneath.
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Once a child, always a child. If you were ever three years old, there remains a part of you that will always be three. Though I am now 56, I am also 36, 16 and 6. All these ages are wrapped up in me. I have lived them day by day and they are mine.
At times I'll find my eight-year-old peeking around the corner or my four-year-old sneaking up on me like a remembered smell. A clerk in a store gives me a strange look and all at once I am six again, and the proof is the sudden frustration, the twinge of fear, or perhaps even the joy that seems to well up out of nowhere.
No one can be a good parent without first being a good child. A father can get down on the floor and play with his toddler, but if he never gets down on the floor of his own heart to connect with the little boy in himself, he'll never be free. If he never remembers what it was like when his dad yelled at him, then he'll keep on yelling at his own kids. If he never feels pity and tenderness for the child he once was, he'll never feel pity or tenderness at all. If he never feels his own littleness, he'll walk around forever carrying a big stick. If he never enters the locked room of his own childhood, he'll never find intimacy with anyone else.
When Jesus exhorted us to change and become like a little child, He was not thinking of just any child. He was thinking of a particular child. He was thinking of the child who lives inside of you.
February 28/2008
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