Children with Questions -- Hope Chronicles 15

A little elf of a five-year-old came up to the counter tonight as I was cashiering at the bookstore. I love kids. I love talking to them and can often readily converse on some of their favorite things. Since it is Feb., things have slowed down. There is more of a chance to have a brief conversation than there was with the franticness of serving customers during the Christmas season.

I appropriately "ahhed" over the Dora the Explorer book and the princess book she came up with and asked how old she was . . . .

I must have put her at ease because she decided that she could ask me questions as well. "Where's your mommy?"

"Well, I don't have a mommy anymore." I could see the wheels in her head turning.

"Where are your kids?"

A bit of a gulp on my part. "I don't have any kids -- yet."

"Where's the other people?" she persisted.

"The other people?"

"You gotta live with people."

I checked for more customers, but there was no one in line. "No, I don't live with anyone. I'm a grownup and sometimes grownups live by themselves." This was obviously a new concept.

"You don't got nobody?"

Well, I didn't know how deep this conversation was going to go. Her mother was writing a check and didn't seem inclined to save me, so I decided to go with diversion. "Would you like a sticker?" She started to ask another question and I said, "How about another?"

I have spent a lot of time with children and had more than my share (considering I don't have kids) of the awkward questions ranging from manners, to bodily functions, to death, and even dating and sex. I try to be a safe person and answer as simply and straightfoward as I can (and fill in the parents or care givers regarding my answers . . . .) But I recognized this innocent conversation as one that has the potential to really trip me up. It hits me in the areas I experience the most longing in: day to day connection, family, and marriage and kids.

The little girl's perspective makes total sense to me. She lives in a world where mom and dad are the world. Children are typically egocentric (the world revolves around me). Actually, adults are egocentric too, but we have learned to mask it better! Her life is one of being a daughter (hence the mother question). The closest people to her are parents; thus, I got the children question. My guess is that she also has brothers or sisters, so how could anyone live alone?

Though I am an adult, I think I also define myself in terms of relationships. So, in the absence of the most key relationships (a rocky family of origin, the death of my mother, no husband, no kids) I can sometimes find myself floundering. Who am I in a world that defines us in relation to another or to a role?

Since it was slow tonight, I had a chance to ponder this. Yes, those relationships are ones that are key in the lives of many, possibly most, people. But the more than being key, being crucial, is my relationship to Jesus. It is He who loves me now and through eternity. It is God who is a father to the fatherless and the defender of widows (and singles) and orphans. It is Jesus who is ultimately my bridegroom. In each of these things and the daily blessings of friends and a half dozen kids I can love on and give back to their parents when they are tired or cranky, there is hope. My hope is in Jesus.

CS Lewis writes the following in Mere Christianity:

"If none of my earthly pleasures satisfy it, that does not prove that the universe is a fraud. Probably earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing. If that is so, I must take care, on the one hand, never to despise, or be unthankful for, these earthly blessings, and on the other, never to mistake them for something else of which they are only a kind of copy, or echo, or mirage. I must keep alive in myself the desire for my true country, which I shall not find till after death; I must never let it get snowed under or turned aside; I must make it the main object of life to press on to that other country and help others do the same."

The things I too often look to, a husband and kids and all of that, cannot satisfy my deepest longing. CS Lewis is right in that. While these things might be blessings and things I desire, they are not the be all-end all. No, that would be Jesus. The beginning and the end, the alpha and omega. I have hope because of who I am in relation to Jesus.