One night, a few years ago, as I lay my little daughter onto her blankets (the soft fleece ones that we put between our bed and the window so that she could sleep by us and not be afraid) I stretched out next to her and saw something very unique. I saw the world as she saw it.
Edwin LeapThe log wall texture was right before my eyes in the dim light, and the smell of wood was faint. The wind outside the walls blew against the window, which was cold to the touch. In contrast, her bed was a nest of warmth, hemmed in on the other side by the high wall of our mattress, springs and bed-frame, that all seemed, from her viewpoint, to loom 10 feet overhead.
As adults, it’s easy to forget what it was all like, being a child, being small, being dependent and vulnerable. It’s easy to forget how tired their legs get when they try to keep up with our ostrich legs that leave them running alongside. It’s easy to forget how frightening the world looks and sounds – everything so inexplicable, though grownups take all the chaos for granted. I remember when one of my children was very small that every time the telephone rang he stood in place, screaming as if a very large and bloodthirsty animal were about to consume him, head to toe. It was only a ring, but he had no idea what a ring meant.
I’ve tried over the years to remember what it was like by getting into their world. I have played on the floor until my compressed sciatic nerve left my leg a useless stick attached to my body. I have spent many evenings beside each of them as they fell asleep, telling stories, reading books, singing and saying prayers to comfort them as they drifted off into the twin mysteries of night and sleep, which together seem so much like a little death that for children their combination is truly terrifying.
Walking down the hallways of their school, I have reached far into my memory to pull back the wonder of learning, the delight of artwork on walls, the smell of lunch, the sound of feet in an empty hallway at end of day, the accomplishment of something I take so for granted, like learning the alphabet.
In playing, I have rediscovered the connection that games bring, the exercise, mental and physical, the mystery of small hiding places in yards that seem, while we are small, vast as a prairie. I’ve also learned that I am too large now to hide in small places, and am constantly found either because I don’t fit in standard nooks and crannies, or because I am always surrounded by affectionate, tail-wagging dogs.
To this day, though they grow older, I try to know what they enjoy and what they fear. I try to understand the things that move them – drums, dance, stories, science and thousands more intricacies that make up who they each are. And to know these things, I have to know them, their world, their touch, their voices. Knowing a person in their world, where they live, is the key to truly loving them.
So, coincidentally, Easter is the story of knowing and loving. We think of it in terms of sin and the cross, and next in terms of the empty tomb. And those are critical items in the finale of the story. But the story of the incarnation is also the story of us being loved by being known. It is the story of God’s son getting down and lying with us, looking up at the stars he helped make and seeing how far away they seemed. Of him seeing the suffering and celebration of humans, of him eating our food and drinking our wine, of him touching and healing adults and children, of him being touched and being held. The incarnation is the story of Jesus being fully man, even in his all-knowing deity.
I believe in the omniscience of God, but I wonder sometimes if in coming to this mess of a world, he didn’t see more acutely how terrifying and vast and lonely it could seem to his children. Maybe it was that knowledge that helped drive him onward to his death and resurrection, because, like the perfect parent that he was – that he remains – he loved by knowing, and saw the depth of our need through the clarity of being – us.