Like a child

My husband is repairing the weather-ravaged front steps of the house (my “love language”), and as he labored yesterday God spoke to his heart in a kind of living parable.

A boy of about 5 was riding down the street on a bicycle slightly too small for him, being chased by a boy of about 4 who was calling out, “I’m following you!”

My husband kept at his work layering concrete and shaping the bull-nose ends of each stair, and the boy on the bike kept riding back and forth hotly pursued by his younger brother or friend exclaiming, “I’m following you!” The pursuer never tired, or if he did he never seemed to give it any thought. My husband noticed that younger boy’s shoes were too big for his feet, but if he was hampered at all by the handicap he seemed unaware of it in his single-minded focus on the bike and rider always just ahead of him.

One is reminded of Elisha resolutely pursuing the soon-to-be-airlifted Elijah in an inscrutable zigzag from Gilgal to Bethel to Jericho, all to a negative chorus of discouragement from the schools of prophets in each town. The diminutive Glenside, Pa., disciple on foot cared nothing for his clumsy feet, his straining limbs, his waning breath, his doleful odds, his dignity, his hard-hat audience of one: All he saw was the boy on a bike straight before him, and he was following him everywhere he went.

My husband came into the house at day’s end and said he thought he understood why Jesus loves children so much and uses them as examples: When they play, they play hard and are totally devoted to and undistracted from their chosen task. Nor are they thrown off the mark by any outside influence. Nothing exists at that moment but the thing they are pursuing:

“At that time the disciples came to Jesus, saying, ‘Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?’ And calling to him a child, he put him in the midst of them and said, ‘Truly, I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven’” (Matthew 18:1-4).

I will say like a child: “Jesus! Wait up! I’m following you!”

And “I will not let you go unless you bless me!”