Except you be as little children.

 My five-year-old daughter is not backwards in coming forwards about who her friends are. She has them ranked in a certain order (an order which may change from day to day, or week to week) but the beauty of her approach is there is no guile or deceit. You know exactly where you stand.

She has a young friend whom she has agreed to marry, when she and he arrive at marriageable age. Whether this comes to pass we will have to wait something like 15 years to find out, but what is sweet about their earnestness and frankness is that they aren’t pretending to hide the fact that they like each other and that they believe in the rightness of marriage.

Somewhere along the way they will become teenagers, and it may be (although I hope it isn’t) that they start to hide who they truly are by trying to become somebody they are not. That seems to happen in the teenage years. We try to be who we are not, in order to win the approval of others who are also pretending to be something they aren’t.

When Jesus says “Except you become as little children, you cannot enter the kingdom of God,” I wonder if he is referring to that attribute of children, that they do not hide who they are, nor what they feel. If they love someone, they say so. If they get lost in a shop, they don’t hesitate to sit down and howl for the moon, because they can’t see mum anymore. They don’t care who sees them crying. One of my children, in his younger days, said to a visitor, "Hey Jean, you're pretty fat. When is your baby coming?" That was an incredibly embarrassing moment, but the visitor was told the truth about her body image.

The most beautiful people I know are the ones who don’t pretend to be what they aren’t. They walk in the light because they want people to know who they are and what they are thinking. One individual in particular, of whom I am very fond, does not hold back her thoughts. She doesn’t suffer fools gladly, and it’s wonderfully refreshing to be in her company, because trivialities and banalities are completely dispensed with.

The easiest people in the world to trust are those who don’t hide anything. Maybe I make myself vulnerable by saying what I truly think, but if I don’t say it, then you don’t know what I am thinking. 

And if you don’t know what I am thinking, then you don’t truly know me.

And if you don’t know me, then I am
alone.

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Hey thanks for reading this post. I really appreciate it. God ever bless you and yours today.