When your 8-year-old is better at faith than you
A post I wrote last summer that I’m sending out on this freezing March day
I was looking around in my Substack at some rough draft pieces that I had written months ago (and abandoned for whatever reason), and found this one from the summer. Hope you guys like it and can derive some encouragement from it.
My darlings.
The summer has been exactly what I knew it would be: full of activity and attitudes and weird weather, and horrifically void of writing time.
But my fellow inmates at + the sanitarium + (i.e. you guys) are a steadfast, patient sort of lot, and I’m so grateful for that.
My husband has taken our progeny out for frozen yogurt tonight (because he knows the thing I love most in the world is the behavior of a couple sugared-up kids this close to bedtime), so I’m jumping on here real quick to give you a quick inspirational story.
My Goldberry is a hardcore reader. She’s always been like this. When she was 9 months old I plopped her, in all her luscious baby fatness, onto my lap one afternoon with the intent of reading some picture books to her. Forty-five minutes later, as I began to run out of books and with no discernible lag in her attention span, I realized my baby girl was not just interested in books: she was enslaved to them.
So this summer she won a couple of cheesy prizes from our library’s summer reading challenge on account of her literary obeisance, and one of them was a free ticket to the county fair. Notice I said county fair, not state fair.
State fairs are scary. They are huge and reek like rancid fries and greasy funnel cake. You can almost hear people’s arteries snapping shut as you mill around in the sweaty, expensive, overwhelming stupor that descends on all fairs. I only ever find myself at a state fair if I am maliciously talked into it by groups of extroverted city friends.
County fairs, on the other hand, are meek and mild and full of bumbling farm animals and their awkward 4-H kids.
So we’re there at the fair and because I can’t say no to my kids sometimes, I tell them they can ride some of the rides. Three rides each, to be precise, because that’s the sort of rip-roaring, carefree parent I am to them.
Gussy rides one ride, cries the entire length of it, and swears off them forever.
So Goldberry becomes heir to all his ride tickets and gleefully starts in on using them.
Because this is a county fair and because this was a Wednesday afternoon, there is hardly anyone riding these rides. Most of the time, she is the only child on the ride.
At one point, she decides to brave a ride that takes its passengers high in the air and does like an up-and-down fake-out thing with them for ten or twelve seconds, before depositing them back onto the ground. She ends up being the only person on this mildly questionable “amusement” contraption, which makes me feel a cathartic loneliness on her behalf. I’ve never been at a fair so deserted, so it seems to me that being the only person on a ride would feel weird and scary.
But she loves the experience and laughs and spends all her ride tickets as fast as she can, proving me wrong at all points as she always does.
I asked her later on, once we were home, if she was scared on any of the rides—especially the ones that she rode alone.
“I wasn’t scared at all,” she said, “because I knew you were standing there right under the ride.”
And that’s how my Goldberry makes me almost cry sometimes.
Her response to my question is something we all need to hear, because it’s something we all need to aspire to, especially when it comes to God.
Some of us have seen this rare childlike trust played out in real life. You can see it in the person who is going through (what looks like from the outside) horrific circumstances, and yet they are somehow not bogged down by them. They ride the texture of the crashing waves beneath them like an oil slick, never succumbing to the deadly, downward inertia of the water.
You all know where I’m going with this but I’m gonna say it anyway.
Is knowing that God is standing right there at the bottom of the ride, as it were, enough to comfort us while we get tossed around by the sometimes hellish circumstances we sometimes find ourselves strapped into?
At one point on the above-mentioned ride, while she was wheeling around in the air, I saw Goldberry’s face cloud a bit, look down to where she thought I’d be standing, see me, and relax. It barely took a second for her sense of safety to return to her, even while at the mercy of these horrific-for-parents-to-watch fair rides. She finished out the ride strong and went on to subject herself to as many of these 10-foot-tall “amusement” machines as her expensive fair tickets would allow.
I think if we find ourselves realizing, as Goldberry did, that the things we are going through are sort of getting out of control and we are starting to panic a little (read: a lot), then we need to be honest with ourselves that, no, we have not made eye contact with Jesus yet over this one. We may believe He’s standing somewhere nearby—“somewhere, probably”—but have we let that belief comfort us on the very real, visceral level that it is meant to?
We may believe He’s standing nearby, but have we made it our goal to tangibly anchor ourselves in His comfort by refusing to look away from Him while the cares of this life bash us to and fro and six ways from Wednesday?
In other words, have we let our belief sprout a body and become something real—something life-altering and tangible?
I love the verse in Psalms where David says,
I will lie down in peace and sleep,
for you alone, O Lord, will keep me safe.
-Psalm 4:8 NLT
Notice David’s inward belief affecting His outward life. The effect of believing that God will keep him safe is that his spirit and body can calm down enough to sleep.
Faith without works is dead. Or, put another way, real faith is such an alive thing that it must and will rise to the surface until it finds its way to the outside world.
If we are not consistently comforted on the insane fair ride that life can oftentimes be, then no matter what we tell ourselves, we have not yet found our Parent’s face in the onlooking crowd. It really is that simple.
I wish I would have known this earlier in my motherhood journey. I believed God was with me technically I guess, but was I deriving any comfort or meaning from that belief? Not really. And because of that, things were harder than they had to be. It only took Goldberry a second to secure her comfort on the fair ride. In real time with adults, it sometimes takes years for us to finally see our Father waiting for us just beneath the tossing fair ride.
The good news is once we reconnect with that steady, trustworthy Parent, the ride starts to feel different. Maybe not amazing, but refreshingly different.
The metaphor of my daughter on a fair ride, of course, breaks down on certain levels. Fair rides can be fun. Oftentimes, life is not. Fair rides are a choice—“Do I want to ride the Vomit-O-Mega-Rama or the Neck-Injury-Fumpy-Bumpy Cars?”—but when it comes to the struggles we have, many times they are not due to choice.
But what doesn’t break down is trust.
The simple, visible trust of a beloved 8-year-old girl.
What helped Goldberry through that moment of panic was her trust in my care for her, even while she was temporarily bopped around by a silly fair ride. She looked for me because no matter how imperfect I am as a parent, she knows that I have always been there for her in the past. She knows that I love her and have the power to help her.
Her trust and her reconnection with the one she trusts calmed her fear and allowed her to get back to enjoying being 8 years old.
She’s a good example for us.
Maybe someday we can reach that level of trust toward God that resides effortlessly in grade school children.
“If you continue to love Jesus,” C.S. Lewis wrote to a little girl named Ruth in 1963, “nothing much can go wrong with you, and I hope you always do so.”1
Verse to go with the post
And let us run with endurance the race God has set before us. 2We do this by keeping our eyes on Jesus, the champion who initiates and perfects our faith.
-Hebrews 12:1-2 NLT
Since you have been raised to new life with Christ, set your sights on the realities of heaven, where Christ sits in the place of honor at God’s right hand. 2 Think about the things of heaven, not the things of earth. 3 For you died to this life, and your real life is hidden with Christ in God. 4 And when Christ, who is your[a] life, is revealed to the whole world, you will share in all his glory.
-Colossians 3:1-4 NLT
Psalm 121, NLT:
I look up to the mountains—
does my help come from there?
2 My help comes from the Lord,
who made heaven and earth!
3 He will not let you stumble;
the one who watches over you will not slumber.
4 Indeed, he who watches over Israel
never slumbers or sleeps.
5 The Lord himself watches over you!
The Lord stands beside you as your protective shade.
6 The sun will not harm you by day,
nor the moon at night.
7 The Lord keeps you from all harm
and watches over your life.
8 The Lord keeps watch over you as you come and go,
both now and forever.
C.S. Lewis: Letters to Children, p.111