Unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. – Jesus
I’ve taken to ordering milk whenever a server at a restaurant shows up with a pretentious wine list. Take the waitress at a restaurant Patti and I visited while on vacation in Santa Monica, California.
“Would you like a glass of wine? Perhaps one of our local California wines? May I suggest…”
“I’ll just have a large glass of 1% milk,” I interrupted.
“Well…sure,” she said, lowering her prized wine list and shrugging her shoulders. Her smile evaporated into a confused look. “…why not?”
Sitting in a fancy restaurant eating dinner with a large glass of 1% milk is one of the ways I’ve been using lately to advance my “childhood project.” Yes, I’m working on becoming a child. It’s been a lifelong goal of mine to be blissfully oblivious of class, status and pretension in all of their ugly forms.
I could have ordered a Coke, or something else fizzy so as to fit in better in that restaurant. But there’s something about milk that truly smashes the smugness of the upper crust set.
I’m not talking about being disrespectful of proper authority. I’m talking about refusing to allow pretentious people to force me to become like them: “Don’t you know who I am? Don’t you know where you are?” That’s class. That’s status. That’s pretension. And that’s the kind of attitude Jesus commands us to avoid like the plague.
Jesus’ command for us to become like little children occurs in the context of the disciples arguing among themselves about who among them was the greatest.1 Grasping for power and influence is acid rain in the kingdom of God. Attitudes of superiority don’t cut it with God. We have to divest ourselves to live where God lives.
“Herb, believing in Jesus is childish,” my philosophy professor told me one time.
“Bingo. I’m making progress!” I thought. My childhood project was working. He couldn’t understand my childlike trust in the Bible.
And then there were the gang members in inner city Los Angeles who couldn’t understand why I wasn’t afraid of them. When I saw them on the street, I would just walk up to them in simple trust – like a child would – and talk to them as ordinary people. I knew what they were thinking: “Don’t you know who I am?” ‘Don’t you know what I can do to you?” It was another addition to my childhood project toolbox.
One problem I have with my childhood project is my education. I include it in my description at the bottom of this post. Readers have a right to know my background. But it can become just another pretension. “Don’t you know who I am?” “Don’t you know how many years of Greek and Hebrew I have?”
So I like to balance that temptation with this quote that I’ve memorized from G. Campbell Morgan.
“The man who can put two and two together as to Semitic languages and Greek dialect, may never see the flame of glory that any little child can see who takes up the Book and studies it with the simple heart of the babe.”2
Just one more tool in my childhood project toolbox.
This post first appeared in NewCommandment.org.
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