To Be Like a Child

I'm reading a book entitled Your Church is Too Safe, and I love it!  In fact, I think there is more to me reading this book than just enjoyment--I think God is wanting to really teach me some things that I need to know.  It's simultaneously exciting and nerve-wracking, but all-in-all really good!

In one passage Buchanan (the author) talks about a study done on babies in France and Germany, where they discovered that newborns actually cry with an accent!  Amazing isn't it?  He writes that "In France, babies consistenly inflect from a low to a high pitch. . .[and] in Germany, it's the opposite, high to low. . . .The French language tends to have an intonational rise at the end of a sentence; the German language an intonational fall at the end.  The womb-bound baby hears this, and copies it at birth."

Buchanan then asks this question: "If earth is heaven's womb, if time is eternity's belly, what song do we overhear from heaven that we try to sing on earth?"  He then goes on to say that heaven's song is 'love', and that we are called to sing this out loud and clear to all within hearing distance.

I want to do this--I so desparately want to sing my life this way.  I use the word 'desparate' intentionally because I recognize how weakly and poorly; how falteringly and inconsistently I sing.  My cry is that I would be transformed into a clearer reflection of heaven's song--the song of love.

You may be wondering the same question, asking yourself if you are allowing yourself to be a reflection of God's love in your everyday life.  Well, here is a reminder that should be an encouragement to all of us:  those babies did very little in getting to that place where they cried the intonations of their mother's native tongue--they were just present.  We are asked to do the same: 

To be present.

God is asking us to spend time with Him--to be in His presence so that we can absorb His song.  He does the singing, and through that we become changed and our 'voice', that is all that is who we are and how we live, begins to reflect Him.

My prayer for us today is this:  that God would put in us a willingness, a longing to be present with Him, and in so doing we would begin to sing the native song of love---

Just like a child.

BT