The Search for Spring

(Originally written 2/21/12)

Tonight after dinner...wait, I should rephrase. Tonight, after a period of time that was dinner for me, 75% putting our 9 month old down for my wife, and 100% track meet for J.- off to the toys, spinning around in his chair, off to Mommy's newly vacated seat, each time summoned back by Dad- he dutifully took his plate to the sink, walked back and asked in a little voice if he could watch a show. I was appropriately hesistant, raised my eyebrows, and said slowly and somewhat sternly, "You may watch ONE show. Now which one do you want to pick?" His exuberant reply stood in stark contrast to my own words: "SPRING!" he practically shouted, tossing his arms up in the air and jumping at the same time. I was taken back, and with his reply still ringing in my ears, my own words, complete with measured severity, rung even louder in my head, over and over. It was one of those seminal "I just sounded exactly like the kind of parent I always said I never would become" moments, and I realized a truth I had experienced my whole life but never been able to articulate: there is something fundamentally wrong with our understanding of joy.

I say wrong, because the word "inadequate", while an appropriate description of many of the other-wordly virtues that we only see a tarnished reflection of here on earth, doesn't sufficiently describe our practice of joy here on earth. Allow me to attempt to explain what I mean. When I was a kid, I was best buds with my friends Paul and Tim. Every Sunday that I can remember, church would end, we would end up playing outside, and one of us would get the ingenious idea of coming over to the other's house. The prospect was brimming with endless possibilities; just considering the experiences we could have in the subsequent 5 hours until the evening service stretched the limits of our 8 year-old brains. We'd find our mothers and beg and beg, promising absurd things like an immaculate bedroom for a month if we could just have this one favor. Our Moms were usually pretty accomodating, unless we'd (1) been particularly rotten that week, (2) gotten caught that morning during the sermon trapping flies from the windows in offering envelopes, crushing them and putting them back in the pews, or (3) tuned out the service completely with our incredibly detailed and epic drawings of the entire US military in all its righteous might, including about a zillion nukes, all pointed at a solitary and rather sheepish-looking Iraqi dictator in the wide open desert.

Then there were the times I remember watching a friend's parent give him permission to do something, but both the assent and the activity were laced with stern looks that seemed to say, "You owe me big, and you'd better toe the line or I am pulling the plug on this immediately". For a ridiculously sensitive kid like myself, who cared far more about any emotional separation from a parent than some stupid game, this struck me as not only pointless, since I wasn't having much fun anyway, but rather poisioned- what should have been a time of play and joy was instead a barrage of guilt via hairy-eyeballed looks and comments that amounted to pre-emptive condemnation. Their demeanor seemed to say, "Have fun, but not too much fun, because I know the kind of kid you are deep down." Why don't you pump the brakes on that joy a bit.

I get why this is necessary at times. Really. I'm pretty new to this parenting thing, but I usually have a much better barometer than my son does on his energy, micheviousness, and proximity to a meltdown. The trouble, I guess, comes in two places. The first is when I'm (gasp) not an infallible parent, and because I'm tired or annoyed or care more about quiet and a smaller swath of destruction, I rain on my son's parade and let him know that just because he's having fun doesn't mean I am, or that he should really appreciate how lenient and sacrificial I'm being right now. Sometimes when I mean "Have fun but be careful because I love you" it comes out more like "sigh-grunt-sigh-stern look, "Ok, but only ONE MORE TIME." But the real trouble comes in the second area. When we inevitably transfer what we know of our parents to our heavenly father, we lump in the vices as well as the virtues, and that ambiguous notion of pre-emptive condemnation I remember so vividly as a child suddenly has far greater implications. And since I can't make God breakfast in bed or butter him up with absurd promises of perfect behavior, I end up, in an attempt to have "fun but not too much fun", tempering all of life with a fashionable amount of protestant reservedness. In its most benign form it deprives me of life giving belly laughs and child like joy; in its most sinister, and perhaps truest form, it results in self-rejection.

I've seen the child-like joy of someone who has had an epiphany of the real meaning of grace, in its ludricrous simplicity and unfathomable life-giving implications, be met by a parent with the words, "Yeah, but you go too far in that direction and you forget all about works and bearing fruit." Calm down, sonny, I've been around a while. I'm sure your youth camp was nice and all, and being young you're excitable, but that stuff will wear off, and I still want you to be mindful of dotting your I's and crossing your T's. Well intentioned, life-crushing, carefully measured reservedness. An abomination of the gospel.

When Jesus says in the Gospels that we must become like little children to enter the kingdom of heaven, it meant a litany of things. And now that I have kids of my own, it has taken on whole new shades of meaning. Jeremiah doesn't question where breakfast is coming from tomorrow. As far as he is concerned there is an endless supply of pancakes, bagels, juice, etc. in our kitchen. As amazed as the four and five thousand were when Jesus fed them all with a pitance, I bet not a single kid there was amazed. Cool, Jesus is feeding us all lunch from that basket. Maybe we can all have dinner at his house, too! Kids are loud, messy, unrefined, and totally accepting. I can just picture the Pharisees shooing the kids away, trying to preserve decorum. The gospel isn't about decorum. It is incredibly messy, graphic, as loud as you can imagine and as absurd as the things my 4 year old says every day. And to those who first grasp it, their joy is like the kid on youtube who gets surprised with a trip to Disneyworld. If we dare to really look at it over and over, and think of what it means, it will remain as fresh and interesting as the episode of Little Bear my son has watched two dozen times or more. I watch him remain glued to the television, cackling at every joke and cheering with the main characters- he knows the ending, right? I mean, he's seen this like a thousand times this week... Child-like joy. That had to be a big part of what Jesus was talking about that day.

That Mom may have been right to keep a close eye on her son. Kids are sinful, just like the rest of us. Often in this fallen world people have what starts off as fun and it devolves into debauchery. Even our selfless acts can be tinged with narcicissm. So we try to have fun, but not too much fun. We try to reign in our excitement about the prospect of spiritual growth because we know it's still us we're talking about, and we just did that dumb thing 10 minutes ago. Perhaps we think we're being appropriately joyful, but I think what we're doing is polluting our joy with self-rejection. Or maybe we're just picturing God peeking out from behind the shades, giving us a stern look to make sure we know He's still watching and ready to levy consequences should they be necessary. But I think the key to all of this is this: We will only experience real joy to the depth that we believe that God wants us to have it, and that sin destroys it. God is not a kill joy. He is a physician who is simply way, way smarter than you. Fun only burns us when it ceases to be real fun, and becomes a cheap imitation instead.

Until we dare to believe that God wants us to have not just adequate joy, enough to temper the painful parts of life, but infinitely great joy, based on his love and independent of our performance, we'll always be trying to stay on his good side and never live in reality- you are loved unconditionally by the all-powerful creator. Is his grace barely enough? Before the foundation of the world was laid God looked at your whole life, the worst thoughts and actions you would ever have, and said, "That one's mine, and I'm going to love them forever." You know what that means?! I get giddy just thinking about it...