My daughter looks up at me and her eyes positively sparkle like the night sky on Independence Day. She smiles big and tells me she wants to be just like me when she grows up.
Then she laughs because she has told me the most wonderful secret she knows and sharing happy secrets is delightful.
“Well, I want to be just like you when I’m little again,” I say. I am smiling with gratitude to the God who gave me such a gem of a child.
“You won’t be little again!” she laughs at me. She can’t understand her grown up mama at all. But that’s okay. I really do mean what I say.
My body is growing up, growing old, the years gray my flesh and I am aware it will become ashes and dust someday. Of course, I fight the gravity and work to be strong and healthy, to draw out the days of vigor as long as I can.
But my soul is fighting for something else; I am fighting to be five years old again in the deep places of my heart.
The years will wizen us if we let them, and their lessons also bring the knowledge that the spark of childlike faith burning in our hearts is the flame we must kindle afresh again and again.
For we are the children of God. May we never lose sight of the blessing of our smallness and weakness in His sight, or forget the miracle that is our adoption into the family of God.
“Before the coming of this faith, we were held in custody under the law, locked up until the faith that was to come would be revealed. So the law was our guardian until Christ came that we might be justified by faith. Now that this faith has come, we are no longer under a guardian. So in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith….” -Galatians 3:23-26
A youthful soul is a grace like no other. What can compare in beauty to the heart that opens wide to the world, leaping with faith into complete trust in the God who lavishes His beauty with such generous joy?
I have a happy secret, and if you lean in close I will whisper it to you.
I want to be just like Him when I grow up. I want to trust and obey until it hurts and not question my motives or my circumstances. I want to sleep through storms and forgive sins with simple prayers of thanksgiving. I want to sit on mountaintops and hear my Father’s voice clearly. I want to give words of truth and grace that turn hearts away from selfishness and toward the God who made them. I want to die with one long exhale that becomes the seed of faith in the lives of all who know me.
I am far from that today. But we have time, now don’t we? Yes, surely God and I, we have just enough time and grace and love to make it all the way there.
This day leads us all one step closer to eternity. Let’s make it count.
