My friend and colleague Aruna Gonsalvez, who works in the Anglicare Family Services team in Wollongong, has written of the impact a little child can have on one's experience of the wonder of our creator God. In this article she dreams of how to encourage our children in their relationship with God through faithful prayer and encouragement.
"Imprinted upon my memory is a vision of my infant son's face tilted upwards, gleaming in a shaft of light through the open wooden doors of the church, holding himself very still, listening, with awe and wonder, to the choir singing Christmas carols.
All babies and toddlers have this impact on me. They have a stunning, artless way of causing me to stand still, and want to know that God is beyond anything we have imagined and described across the centuries of our presence in the cosmos.
Just gazing into the face of a young child provokes me to a yearning for the Creator.
To see, hear, touch, smell, taste the One who imagined such tender human presence and who then gave that child life.
Has it been in fear of losing our children that we have done so much to keep them away from Him who imagined them, birthed them and yielded them into our hands to nurture & grow.
How do I let a child come to Him? I must find the way; I must find the way to bring back a young child to Him, that he might know his Father in heaven.
What a reunion!
A young child's amazing will to know will surely be enough if I just begin by pointing in the direction of the unseen God of whom it is written:
1 GOD, brilliant Lord, yours is a household name.
2 Nursing infants gurgle choruses about you;
toddlers shout the songs
That drown out enemy talk,
and silence atheist babble. Psalm 8
As I have looked into the faces of my children I have felt that all things are possible until they are otherwise taught.
They believe until they have reason not to.
This wonder, belief, assurance of possibilities sadly does not last much beyond their 2nd or 3rd year. What changes? I believe it is language, the human language of unbelief, of impossibilities, of stale old knowledge.
What if we allowed them to come to Jesus and hear his words and be blessed by him?
How shall we teach our children about our God, though whom all things are possible?
'Believe in me, ask in my name, I will do it for you.'"
Thanks Aruna for your words.
