Darrow: Learning Time: “Childlike”
We are all children of God. What was Jesus talking about, when he told his friends that the only way onto the Creator’s good road, the way of faithful, fulfilled living, is to become as trusting as a little child?
This week in our morning devotions, my wife and I have been learning about connections between Buddhism and following the way of Jesus. One morning I heard these words by the Franciscan Friar, Richard Rohr, and I have been chewing on them since:
The presence of God is infinite, everywhere, always, and forever. You cannot not be in the presence of God. There’s no other place to be. The only change is always on our side—God is present, but we’re not present to Presence. We’ll make any excuse to be somewhere other than right here. Right here, right now never seem enough.
But here’s the problem—we’re almost always somewhere else. We are either reprocessing the past or worrying about the future. If we watch our mind, it doesn’t think many original thoughts. We just keep thinking in the same problematic ways that our minds love to operate.
We can say that all spiritual teaching—and I believe this is not an oversimplification—is teaching us how to be present to the moment. When we’re present, we will experience the Presence.
I was thinking that perhaps part of what Jesus was getting at, about trusting as a little child, is being where we are, in the moment, trusting that God is with us, and that we are with God, and that there is something good, and beautiful about being right here.
Life can be hard, and there is so much sadness, and hardship, and suffering in our world. There is conflict, and cruelty, and pain, and illness, and people we care about get injured, or sick, and they die.
If we allow all the hard things to stop us from seeing anything good, we may miss a lot.
One of the gifts of having children in our lives, is that very often, all they really want and need from us, is to be right here, with them.
I wonder if that’s actually what God is hoping for, for us, as well, that we just be who we are, right where we are, and know that God is with us, and loves us. Amen
Darrow Woods: Writer of Things 