Getting Back to Trust

When my father was in his last days, after 96 years of life, he said that he spent most of his time “thinking about when the kids were little and we were all at home.” Helen thought he meant when his own children were little, but I knew immediately that he meant when he was a child.

I started preaching when I was 19. I would call from home to home, as pastors did in those days, and was fascinated at how old people would tell me stories from their childhood. They weren’t just telling stories for the sake of the telling, though, as we usually accuse old people of doing. They were trying to understand their lives by going back to the beginning.

I once did a program on this for a group of winter-years folks. Afterwards, a woman with a distinguished and successful career behind her said to me: “When I was three, my baby brother died. He choked on a cough drop a nurse gave him for whooping cough. There was a lot of anger as well as grief, but no one talked about it when I was around. It was like he never existed. I’ve just realized that I never got to grieve my baby brother. I have to go back and let that little three-year-old girl feel what she needs to feel.”

Everything we do or don’t do as adults, everything we feel or don’t feel, comes from childhood. The years of winter give us our last, and probably best, chance to understand who we are in these bare-branch years because of how we were formed in those bud-branch years.

To be able to trust God for an unknowable future, we have to go back and know God as children. “If you would enter the Kingdom of Heaven, you must become as a little child.”