My three-year-old grandson Jace loves to lead us in table grace. He thinks it great fun when we all join hands and recite the grand liturgy “God is Great.” Unaware that Christians have been divided for centuries over whether to pray “let us thank him for our food” or its equally attested variant “we may thank him for our food,” Jace lustily belts out the prayer in toddler-speak which makes it hard to know what choice his convictions have called him to make. What he lacks in precision he makes up for in joy!
Susie, Jace’s four-year-old cousin, has already learned to face life’s crises with impromptu prayer. One evening she stood on a chair in the dining room and saw soup bowls at every place and a dish of crackers at the center. Susie hates soup. What’s more, her mom was trying a homemade, curried squash soup which all the adults were excited about. So if a kid were
to learn to like soup for the first time, this probably wasn’t the night for it. She decided to petition God about it, knowing it would be pointless to approach any of us.
Susie didn’t know that Gramma Gayle was in the kitchen. Gramma was just out of sight but not out of hearing when Susie sought Divine intervention, “Please God, let me not have soup tonight, just crackers, not soup.”
Then Susie remembered that if she really wanted something special from her mom, her mom would tease her and make her say, “Please, oh most wonderful Mother” before she would comply. So Susie finished her petition with utter sincerity and innocence praying, “Please let me not have soup tonight. Please, oh most wonderful God.”
As she got down off her chair and walked away from the dinner table, still unaware that Gramma was listening, Susie continued in a countenance of reflective prayer saying quietly but fervently, “Please, oh most wonderful God.”
At supper that evening, when all the other cousins were casting dubious glances at their steaming bowls of squash soup, Susie was smiling at a plate with a peanut butter and honey sandwich on it cut in the shape of a dinosaur. I’m not sure what effect Susie’s prayer had on our Sovereign God, but it sure worked on Gramma!
In our house we cut the kids’ sandwiches with special, extra large cookie cutters into shapes of dinosaurs because Teagan, our other four-year-old grand, is absolutely fascinated with dinosaurs. She watches a TV show called Dinosaur Train
at home. She can recite a paragraph-long description of a dozen or so of her favorite dinosaurs including whether they are carnivores and if they are nocturnal, “That means they come out at night, Grampa.”
She was in heaven when the family visited the Children’s Museum in St. Paul to see the dinosaur exhibit including a life scale model of her absolute favorite dinosaur, a Troodon (troe – adon) that she could climb on. They even had a Troodon nest the kids could sit in.
Later that week, still excited about her visit to the museum, Teagan was talking about it with her mom at the dinner table. “Mom, I really want to become a real
toodon!”
Her mom, my daughter Britta, said, “Wouldn’t that be interesting?” Britta is a preschool teacher. There might have been a hint of condescension in her response after a long day listening to pre-schooler imaginations. Realizing she was not being taken seriously enough, Teagan looked at her mom and said reprovingly, “Mom, God can do anything!”
We’re never too young to start thinking about God and it is an especially good idea for God to be one of the first persons we talk to. Earlier I said that I wasn’t sure what effect Susie’s prayer had on God. Actually I am quite sure that God was delighted with it. The important thing is that we grow in our understanding of God and in our skill at communicating with him. It is very unhelpful to face grown-up problems with only a four-year-old’s faith. If you tried to communicate your heartfelt concerns about something to your spouse and did so by reverting to the vocabulary and linguistic skills you had at age four, you would really handicap your efforts… not to mention annoy the heck out of your spouse.
If it has been a while since you thought seriously about God, why not get up a little earlier this Sunday and drop in on God’s people. If you open your heart and mind, you will likely be challenged to think about God more deeply and communicate with him more satisfactorily. Which could come in handy if you are facing squash soup for dinner tonight.
Each month a member of the
Cook County Ministerium will
offer Spiritual Reflections. For
April, our contributor is Pastor
Dave Harvey, who has served
as pastor of Grand Marais
Evangelical Free Church since
February of 2008.
Leave a Reply