Youth and Age – Sunday, October 21, 1984
George Eliot once observed that we would never have loved the earth so much if we had not first been children here. It was then that each season came with the freshness and wonder of first love; each golden leaf that fell was a miracle. Often, even the things we love as adults are dear to us because they carry the nostalgia of some half-remembered past.
Just as it would be a superficial world without the aged, it would be a melancholy one without children. Yet, there are times when we forget that. Every teacher of students knows that youth can seem raw, awkward and ignorant. Adults have been complaining for centuries that their children have no manners. We are sometimes wearied by their spills and fingerprints, their selfishness and tears. “Grow up,” we may shout at children, forgetting that “if youth be a defect, it is one that (they) outgrow only too soon,”1 anyway.
The great challenge is to remember that children are incomplete, unfinished. We don’t look at a building under construction and criticize it because the pipes show. Yet many of us are offended by a child’s raw edges. To a great extent how effective we are with the children in our lives will depend on whether we are exasperated or excited by the fact that they are not yet finished.
As one writer said, “Men and women are what happens to little boys and girls,”2 and the best gift we can give tomorrow is to be patient with children today and see in them all the beauty and excellence just waiting to be quickened.
If we label them when they are sloppy or rude, we may stunt them at our own definition. If we see only their drawing on the walls, their running through the house, we are looking at what is temporary, not eternal. It is like criticizing the young for being short. Finally, if children are invisible to us, we make them think they are unimportant.
But they are not. Their feelings of triumph or pain are just as big to them as ours are to us; their place in the Lord’s scheme is just as vital. So let us rejoice in the promise of childhood and, when we are annoyed at the things children are not, let us remember that the Lord Himself loves all the unfinished things of the world—even us.
1 Richard Evans’ Quote Book, Publishers Press, pg 32.
2 Ibid.
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October 21, 1984
Broadcast Number 2,879