Sunday school lessons at church are closely aligned with Scripture.
Still, what he said intrigued me for another reason: A friend of ours, the
wife of a pastor at a church in Colorado, had once told me about
something her daughter, Hannah, said when she was three years old. After
the morning service was over one Sunday, Hannah tugged on her mom’s
skirt and asked, “Mommy, why do some people in church have lights over
their heads and some don’t?”
At the time, I remember thinking two things: First, I would’ve knelt down
and asked Hannah, “Did I have a light over my head? Please say yes!”
I also wondered what Hannah had seen, and whether she had seen it
because, like my son, she had a childlike faith.
When the disciples asked Jesus who is the greatest in the kingdom of
heaven, Jesus called a little boy from the crowd and had him stand among
them as an example. “I tell you the truth,” Jesus said, “unless you change
and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.
Therefore, whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest in the
kingdom of heaven.”^5
Whoever humbles himself like this child...
What is childlike humility? It’s not the lack of intelligence, but the lack of
guile. The lack of an agenda. It’s that precious, fleeting time before we
have accumulated enough pride or position to care what other people
might think. The same un-self-conscious honesty that enables a three-year-
old to splash joyfully in a rain puddle, or tumble laughing in the grass with a
puppy, or point out loudly that you have a booger hanging out of your nose,
is what is required to enter heaven. It is the opposite of ignorance—it is
intellectual honesty: to be willing to accept reality and to call things what
they are even when it is hard.
All this flashed through my mind in an instant, but I remained
noncommittal.
“A light, huh?” was all I said.
“Yeah, and they have yellow from here to here,” he said, making the sash
motion again, left shoulder to right hip. “And white from here to here.” He
placed his hands on his shoulders, then bent forward and touched the tops
of his feet.