Words Of Wisdom From A Five Year Old

This past Friday at the Youth Home our lesson was on creation. My wife was reading from The Early Reader’s Bible. “God Made Many Things – At one time there was no world. There was no sun. There was no moon. There were no stars. ‘I will make a world,’ God said. So God made our world. Will you thank Him for our world.” And then the kids all said, “Thank you God for our world.” The story continued, “’I will make a sun,’ God said. God made the sun. It helps you see all day long. Will you thank Him for the sun?” And then the kids again said, “Thank you God for the sun.” And in that moment of us enjoying the children’s unison chorus before Kara continued to the creation of the moon and stars, our 5 year old said, “The dark needed the light so God made the sun.”

I am amazed at the profound wisdom in those words. I know he didn’t understand the depth of what came out of his mouth, but I have been unable to shake those words from my head. The dark needed the light. The statistics of the poverty, suicide rate and unemployment of the San Carlos Apache Reservation are overwhelming. They are thrown around all the time and our minds cannot fathom what they really mean. And yet the greatest need is a relationship with Jesus Christ. Across the United States, approximately 1 out of 10 Native American have a relationship with Jesus Christ. The dark needs the light.

In the midst of wrestling with this I was reminded of a story from Frederick Buechner’s book The Magnificent Defeat.

“It is a peculiarly twentieth-century story, and is almost too awful to tell, about a boy of twelve or thirteen who, in a fit of crazy anger and depression, got hold of a gun somewhere and fired it at his father, who died not right away but soon afterward.

"When the authorities asked the boy why he had done it, he said that it was because he could not stand his father, because his father demanded too much of him, because he hated his father. And then later on, after he had been placed in a house of detention, a guard was walking down the corridor late one night when he heard sounds from the boy's room, and he stopped to listen. The words he heard the boy sobbing out in the dark were, 'I want my father, I want my father.'"

I am convinced that if we could really hear the cries on the reservations across the United States, not the physical cries or the superficial cries but the cries from the depths of the souls, that we would hear “I want my Father.” The dark needed the light so God made the sun. The dark needed the light so God gave His Son.

Thank you God for the Son.

-tory