Beautiful Naivety

I sit at the top of my attic stairs at the moment, listening to peaceful music like Death Cab & Joe Purdy, and Death Cab mutters a line, that says "Love is watching someone die, who'se going to watch you die?" I thoroughly enjoyed that line, and thought it deserved some dissecting. But not tonight. I have not prepared myself well enough for a post on the definition of love, and I'm pretty sure there are a ton of books already about that.

Tonight's post is about innocence & frailty, and why being a kid is where it's at. I read this book over Christmas break, a secular fictional book, that coincidentally paralleled the Christian story, and I thought I'd write on it. In the book, a five year old named Jack is trapped with his mother in one Room, their whole lives. He however loves the room, and doesn't understand why his all-knowing, constantly loving, mother would ever want to leave this 'paradise' he calls home. The real truth is that she was kidnapped and he was born there, but that doesn't tie into this at all. If you haven't read the book, I will ruin it for you tonight.

See, in the book they escape, and suddenly Jack's life twists upside down. He doesn't understand everything around him like he did in his one room, his mother is distant and can't always tell him the answers, and he must constantly get medicine to become accustomed to the absurd amount of germs in the air new to his body. This terrible twisting of the fate reflects the story of all of us at some point in our lives. We 'escape' from the all-knowing comfort of God's warmth, and suddenly we can't handle everything around us. No one is there to help us, and we don't know why. The difference is that while Jack couldn't return to his old life, we can return to our God.

More than anything, this is about innocence, as I said. Picasso, the acclaimed artistic genius, said "Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist when we grow up."

This extremely to the point quote slapped me in the mental face this morning, and my mind started working.
Matthew 18 says “Therefore, whoever takes the lowly position of this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. 5 And whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me.”
And so it is my opinion that we all start out with eyes aglow, staring up at the store window, wondering what the shiny bicycle is. Eventually, knowledge takes the place of imagination, and we know; it’s just a boring two-wheeled vehicle, nowhere near as fast as my Mazda.
As we grow, we learn, and soon our minds are full of useless & important facts, and the child in our hearts disappears, replaced by an adult, wary and exhausted. If you pictured the supposed ‘perfect Christian,’ would he be tired and worried, with a frown on his face, life in routine, or would he be standing tall, with a big smile and eyes straight forward? I think the latter is the answer, and I think those characteristics stem from the child inside.

To recount this semi-short and almost incomplete post: John Locke may have been correct, to an extent. We all may be evil, but we do begin our lives with a sort of ‘Tabula Rasa,’ as he said; a clean slate. As we grow, we become more knowledgeable, stronger, and more evil. We (myself included) begin to think we are powerful, and our egos grow or even shrink, to the point of unhealthy behavior. Losing our childhood faith leads to the moving away from truth, the moving away from our Father. We even found a new word for someone who ‘trusts too much,’ calling them naive. The point of this is: perhaps naivety isn’t such a bad thing.

Food for thought; God bless,
Austin