Faith

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And a Little Child Shall Led Them

My four-year-old son and I were playing in the backyard when one of the neighbor children rode up on her bike. Though she was five years older than my son, she would sometimes stop to play with him. They both enjoyed the sandbox we had in our backyard, so it was something they had in common.

I sat listening to the little girl banter casually as they played. She began to tell my son about a rhyme she had learned from a popular cartoon. In a singsong voice, she repeated it several times. I stiffened. Though the rhyme was a very old one known to schoolchildren for generations, it was something that made fun of others, and I didn't appreciate her teaching it to my son. Because she not from a Christian home. I was unsure how to handle the situation. I wanted her to continue to come over to play, for it gave us an opportunity to be salt and light in her life. But I also did not want a wrong influence to penetrate my son's mind. I quickly prayed, "Lord, please don't let him remember this rhyme. Show me what to do."

Even as I opened my eyes, the Lord was already working on the situation. The little girl finished her sing-song, and my son, wanting to share what he knew, began to sing his own song for her. I heard his little four-year-old voice singing a favorite he had learned in a summer VBS program, "Jesus is a friend of mine and He can be yours too. J-E-S-U-S, J-E-S-U-S, J-E-S-U-S, and Jesus is His name."

I looked at my son with such pride. What child is this? I wondered. At once it struck home to me that my child was not mine. He belonged to the Lord. And for the first time I was fully able to appreciate the Father's words over His own Son, "This is my Son in Whom I am well pleased" and I could almost hear the Lord speaking these very words over my little boy.

The Lord's presence rested on the three of us there in the back yard as the children continued playing in the sand in silence. And I felt tremendous awe at what I had just witnessed. The Holy Spirit had just used this four-year-old boy to express God's love to an eight-year-old girl. There had been nothing complex about it. It was such a simple expression of love, and it made me wonder why we adults always manage to complicate the things of God. There is good reason that Jesus told His disciples to "let the children come" to Him. Most likely it was so that the disciples could learn from the children how to relate to Him. Jesus came in simplicity and taught in simplicity so that God's love could be easily understood. No wonder the Bible says, "And a little child shall lead them."

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