Thursday, September, 23, 2010

Finding joy

I don’t think I ever met a child I didn’t like, at least a little.

I love the playful innocence of children who make fun of me during children’s sermons. I love the unfiltered connection between what they feel and what they say.

I love feeling the brand new tender life of infants. I love the wonder and openness of four-year olds discovering the world. I love the spontaneity and fidgety energy of third-graders who can barely keep their butts attached to a chair.

And I want to bless them all.

This is biggest reason I love children: They elicit the deepest beauty and care that is in me. When I am with them I become the love that I am. They draw from my soul the best that is in me.

I feel their acute need to know that they belong, and I ache for them to feel treasured for what they are--irreplaceable expressions of life who is Life. Each enters the world a craving center of near-infinite need, crying out for blessing.

I want to supply that blessing. Truth is, however, I also want to do it for myself. For in blessing them I discover in my heart the One who is Blessing Himself.

God is this energy, this gravity who continually draws me to people and places I can love so that my heart may bring forth whatever hidden decency and beauty might yet be there.

This is all average, of course. This is how God works. This is how human beings are.

We are made for blessing. We crave it, needing to bless someone else just as much, if our lives are to know the joy that God intends.

This is why I find so much joy at baptisms. It’s why baptism is one of the two most sacred acts of the church’s communal life. We are drawn into the central activity of God--blessing tender and fragile life, there to see who God is and for what we are made.

It’s not just that we bless a child with the infinite grace of an unimaginable Love. Together, we also engage in an action in which we act out the central purpose of our life and discover the place where lasting joy is found.

We bless a human soul with a love we can’t begin to understand, only to discover that this unsurpassable love is also in us--and that joy is found in blessing.

Pr. David L. Miller