Innocent Wonder

You know who's been challenging the crap out of me lately? Babies! Some months ago I was in Boone, NC and something was going on and I had restricted myself to the room in the back where I had been staying at my sister and brother in-law's house. I had gotten out my journal and begun to write how I was feeling. "I know that right now, outside that door, there exists something that I want to refuse exists, but it does. I yearn so badly to have the innocence of a child, to be less complex than Evie. To only know how to love and forget quickly. Why do we have to grow up? This world takes a toll on you! We start out doing fine and being who we are in the image of God, yet the further along we go, the more we forget about simply being; how to simply be." I mentioned how Evie was too innocent and forgiving and forgetting for me to even be close to out of my years of callusing.

I was just remembering about how my mom, after she went up to Boone and celebrated Evie's first birthday w/ them, was telling me about how Evie would stick her hand in the cake and then look at her hand intently and in such wonderment of the texture and consistency by rubbing it in between her fingers. I ask myself why we seem to always lose that sense of a mysteriously engaging awe-ful Other? I don't think Jesus meant educationally ignorant when he tells us that we must have the mind of a child in order to enter the kingdom of heaven, but rather having the innocent wisdom that tends to fade away through miles walked on this road of life. A taste of heaven can be on earth when we immerse ourselves in the mystery that surrounds us and realize that what is seen and felt and heard and smelled and even imagined is nothing like what is to come. But, it is embracing that mystery which is now while knowing it is not all that is. It's being totally dependent on Someone Else whose kiss seems to always make things better. Maybe we aren't even hurt and we cry just to know we're loved. I know I'm probably not saying anything really profound or anything. I'm just saying what's on my heart and mind.

Peace.