06.03.2022 – On Giving Up Childish Ways

Becky and I are back from Missouri where we spent a week or so with our grandchildren while our son and his wife were off on a trip celebrating their anniversary.  It was a good, if exhausting time for us, but we are mostly so glad we can help in such a way.

Micah, the second youngest of our grandchildren, will turn three years old in August and is a happy, talkative, and joy-contagious toddler. Micah loves books and loves having an adult read to him. I often took the reading assignment, especially as Becky became the favorite of the 16-month old who was a little apprehensive about his parents being suddenly gone.  Becky and Gabriel became great friends.

By far, Micah’s favorite read-aloud book was a complete collection of Curious George stories, “Monkey George,” as he calls him.  If any of you have trouble sleeping at night, might I recommend the complete collection of Monkey George stories.  Read them aloud and you will be in deep slumber in no time at all.

In addition to Monkey George, we had repeated reads of Ferdinand the Bull and the Story of the Little Gingerbread Boy.  And once in awhile one of the cardboard books that are more Gabriel’s speed than Micah’s.

One of the carboard books was about sea creatures.  The book featured foam inserts of the various creatures on each page.  Page one showed the blue whale pictured in the header of this post.  Micah told me it was a dolphin, and I foolishly took the bait, as it were.

“I think it’s a blue whale,” I said.

“No, it is a dolphin,” the nearly-three year old insisted.

I wisely pointed out that the creature in question was not gray as a dolphin would be and did not have a fin on its back.  Growing impatient with my thick-headedness, Micah again insisted the pictured creature was a dolphin.  Discretion would have had me agreeing, but valor demanded that I hold my ground.

“Look,” I replied, “It says blue whale,” as if that would persuade him.

Micah was not impressed.

To borrow the Apostle Paul’s image, Micah was speaking like a child, thinking like a child, and reasoning like a child (1 Corinthians 13:11). Had I more quickly given up childish ways, insisting on being right when right didn’t matter, we might have avoided our mutual frustration.

In 1 Corinthians 13, Paul is writing about the abiding nature of love, its unchangeable reliability.  The image of childhood and adulthood is paired with the image of seeing in a mirror dimly and then face to face – a reminder that when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away.

Post-modernity has lost a sense of the absolute, of non-negotiable truth.  It cannot comprehend the love Paul describes in 1 Corinthians 13.  Sometimes such love demands that we put away a childish insistence on being right.  There’s a good chance that one of these days Micah will come to see that big sea creature on page one as a blue whale and not a dolphin.  In the meantime, faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.