A Picture

Today, I was sitting with my friends at a table during the fellowship hour. We were talking, laughing, and eating; then my friend Caroline leaned over and picked up a very young child who could only speak in monosyllabic nouns. In five minutes, we were all enraptured at her "pictures", doodled lines on Post-It notes. Jared, who had just received a particularly scrambled line, was inquiring what the various symbols were.

"What's this one"

"*gargle* Ummm, tree."

"Oh, a tree, huh? How about this one?"

"Rock."

"I see." He got himself a Post-It note and drew a picture for our new little friend of a house in a field with a tree, cloud, and the sun. "Here, now you've made one for me and I've made one for you, see?"

Her face broke into an enormous smile as she started stammering out the names of the various objects, clearly impressed at her own abilities.

And I thought, thank God for children. They are so precious and innocent, and yet so intelligent and insightful that I find myself in constant awe of their power. A power so great it can captivate the minds of seven college students, who have the cares of homework, relationships, and jobs on their minds. Who can think about Plato's Meno, Tacitus's Histories, or the Enuma Elish when a little miracle from heaven is sitting two feet away, giggling? It was enough for us to see her sweet face, which had no stain of worry or pain upon it. I cannot describe how important an experience like this is to me. Besides my family I have found that what I miss most are little babies, toddlers, children - the ones who depend on us so much yet also make our burdens easier. And at college, you're lucky to ever see anyone younger than 15 years old. You live in a world so dominated by age and pressure, that the heaviness of it all can become painful.

Oh, I thank God for my church!