By Mike Mason

A saintly woman once told me that having a child brings a couple face to face with reality.

“Before becoming parents,” she observed, “people live in a kind of dream world.”

She’s right. It takes children to make grownups of us.

No one in their right mind would have invented children. They are too impractical, too unwieldy, too preposterous. Intelligent people sat down and came up with wonderful inventions like the lightbulb, the telephone, the atom bomb.

But no one would have dreamed of designing and patenting a child. Even if they did, it would have been a diaperless child, a non-crying child, a well-behaved and obedient child. That is how inventions are. They are meant (at least in theory) to make life easier, not harder. They are conveniences.

Children are not convenient. This is the difference between an invention and a creation. With a little child running around the house, suddenly our inventions are not so powerful. Suddenly we’re thrown back on the author of creation: God.

Children, let’s face it, are not little angels. When Jesus pointed to one and said, “Be like this,” it’s a good thing the kid wasn’t having a temper tantrum at the time. Or is it? Was Jesus pointing to the child’s good behaviour or to something else? Good behaviour, while a fruit of the gospel, is not its heart.

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We adults think  young children require an enormous amount of energy and attention. But we see them this way only because we ourselves have grown so fond of independence.

Children charm us back into a proper balance of interdependence: in a word, love. While children are busy pouring their lives into ours without a thought, we grumble at having to return the favor.

But children are the ones who have it right: the way people thrive is by lavishing attention upon one another.

One thing is certain: if we do not willingly give our children the right kind of attention, we shall be compelled to give the wrong kind.

The time we do not spend caring and playing will be consumed in damage control. As our kids grow older, every hour we have not invested in loving them will be spent instead sitting in the offices of counsellors, principals, probation officers.In short, children expose our idols. Every time we think of a child as ‘interrupting’ or ‘interfering with’ our lives, it’s because we have erected an idol in the place where love alone ought to reign.

Ironically, our idol may be some task we think we are performing for the sake of our children, only to find that we have exchanged the God of living relationships for an isolating god of our own devising.

This is the gist of Jesus’ rebuke to his disciples, “Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them” (Luke 18:16). To let little children come to you, to be available with open and loving arms, is to let them come to Jesus.

This is an except from ‘The Mystery of Children’. For other pieces by Mike Mason and details of how to obtain the book see here.

April 2008