Disappearing smiles

This month’s big project, in the gaps between cooking and laundry, is to tackle the photo albums. Someday when I am gone and my children have to clean out the attic, I want them to be able to see a logical thread of a life of events, not the jumble of baby pictures mixed with prom photos.

The early albums are the most fun—by far. The reason is not hard to tell: The children look so happy then. When you get up into the pressed school uniforms and the pre-teens, the pictures start to change. The smiles disappear. In some shots they look like they’re mad at someone. (They’re probably mad at me.) They look like they’ve been hurt by someone. (Probably by me.) One reads creeping disillusionment on their faces, and the beginnings of a hardening that refuses to be disillusioned by anyone, anymore.

Get to the later years and a loss of innocence is noted. Why, pray tell, is a smirk presumed to be more grown-up than a smile? More intelligent? Why is it advancement and adulthood to trade in laughter with abandon for a look of studied disdain? One recalls the introspective Burt Bacharach–Hal David song that queries, “And if only fools are kind, Alfie, / Then I guess it is wise to be cruel.” Children turning into adolescents seem to make that choice.

Digory and Polly in C.S. Lewis’ The Magician’s Nephew come upon the ruins of the great hall of an ancient civilization, filled with frozen figures like waxworks, all garbed in regal finery. As the two children study the faces of the figures, they look kind and wise. But as they walk deeper into the room the countenances change gradually:

“The faces here looked very strong and proud and happy, but they looked cruel. A little further on they looked crueler. Further on again, they were still cruel but they no longer looked happy.”

For a second opinion I asked my husband what he makes of the transformation of faces (of our children, not the fairy-tale statues). He had a different take. He answered that it is being in the world does that to us, that turns smiles upside-down. The spirit of the age and “the god of this world” (2 Corinthians 4:4) take a toll on its people the longer they are immersed in his toxic atmosphere. He pointed me to Romans:

“For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God. For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now” (Romans 8:19-22).

I feel sad for my children and want them always to stay babies and carefree. But here is the important cosmic question that must be pondered: Is it better to be frozen in infantile obliviousness to evil or to experience it full-on and be redeemed from it to a joy that is even greater for having known the sorrow? Is this not the very definition of redemption? Is this not what makes redemption an even more glorious story than a hypothetical alternate universe in which there had been no enemy, no fall, no rising action, no climax, no resolution, and no happily ever after?

Praying for our kids to be cocooned from the sorrows of cruel reality is not an option. Forget it. Let us lay hold of the only option, and the more glorious one, availed to us in Christ, and let us pray that our children will learn “how to refuse the evil and choose the good” (Isaiah 7:15), and to reject “what some call the deep things of Satan” (Revelation 2:24).

Scripture implies that for those who come to Jesus this sad drama we have brought our children into will be worth every tear and scar along the way:

“For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us” (Romans 8:18).