I know this verse might seem like an unusual choice for an uplift, but it kind of chose me today so I’m going with it. And I’m going to push back on this verse a little bit too, because in light of some conversations I’ve had lately, I wonder if maybe we’ve been thinking about this child-like faith stuff all wrong.

So often this verse is used by preachers and teachers to tell us to have child-like faith, and then if you’re like most people, you interpret that to mean a kind of naive faith that just blindly accepts whatever they hear.

This past week, I was talking with someone who said that kids are “closer to the source” and since they don’t have decades of experiences clouding things up they often have the most honest things to say.
Now that is interesting.
The more we learn and experience, the more we create stories around those experiences, and often it is those stories that move us further away from God, and who God created us to be.
No matter what kind of struggle or difficulty we are going through, we often make the reason to be our fault. We make the bad things about us.
I got sick?  Must be a punishment for something I did.
Someone I love died? I didn’t pray hard enough.
A friend or significant other left? I’m not good enough.
Lose my job? I’m incompetent.
I’m depressed or anxious? I’m broken.
Lonely? I’m unloveable.

We take bad things in our lives and write a story about why it’s happening, and it’s almost never a good one about us.  It’s also almost never true.
I had a psychology professor once say that you’d never say those things to a kid – so why do we say them to ourselves?
You’d never look at a kid and say “well you’re broken”
“Something must be wrong with you”
“You’re just not good enough”
You’d NEVER say this to a 6 year old.
So why is it okay for us to say this to ourselves?

If you’ve ever hung around little kids, especially ones under the age of 5, you’ll notice they haven’t yet learned how to make the bad stuff into a negative story about themselves.
It’s a brain development thing.
They cry when they are hurt,
they throw a tantrum when they are mad (or frustrated, or for no reason actually),
and then in a few minutes they forget about it and move on to the next.
But when they don’t get the dessert they wanted or when they fall down and get hurt,
they don’t turn it on themselves.
they don’t create a story about how they are broken and somehow less than.
they don’t tell themselves that they must have done something to deserve what’s happening to them.
That’s a grownup thing. That’s all us.
(Important side note: trauma changes brain chemistry and development so this isn’t necessarily true for kids who have undergone trauma)

So what if we stopped being such grownups about this?
What if we really did go through our life with a more child-like faith?
Not one that is naive, but one that is full of confidence in who they are.
Kids are joyful and full of life because they haven’t begun to doubt themselves yet.
They haven’t wondered if they are enough.
They haven’t doubted that Jesus loves them and that God is giving them good things.
They just accept it and run around with the freedom of knowing they don’t have anything to worry about.
That, my dear uplifters, is the Kingdom of God.
That is what Jesus means when he says we should receive the Kingdom of God like a child.
And it’s available for all of us. All the time.
Doesn’t that sound awesome?

So let’s try it.
This weekend, no matter what you’re doing,
no matter how you feel,
no matter what you’re going through,
Remember that you are God’s.
Jesus loves you.
And then live and act and be and do as if you believe it.
As if it were true.
Because it is.