Recently, Oli wrote this post entitled ‘The Wisdom of Children‘ on his blog which resonated with me. And it reminded me of this little quote on my wall.
Grown ups rarely understand anything. And it is tiresome for children to always be explaining things to them.
- The Little Prince
One of the reasons I love being around my friends’ children is that I’m constantly learning from them. They keep things simple and they are really bad liars.
So many times I remember with my smallgroup we’d be debating something a few of us (or all of us) felt challenged by. And then Miss Sweetroot (my friends’ daughter) would say something or do something later that week that would floor all of us and just nail it on the head quite matter of factly.
You see children and they are constantly trying new things and living in the moment before we teach them to over analyse everything. If you see me with my godson – who has no fear at all and buckets of never ceasing energy – you’ll hear the same 2 words over and over again coming from my lips:
‘Be careful!’
How often to we laugh at the dreams of children because we’ve become so cynical, squashing their creativity and maybe preventing them from living out exactly what they are called to do?
They explain things to us again and again, and the edges of our lips start to curl as we try not to laugh.
I’m reminded watching interviews with gymnasts in the lead up to Olympics of parents who speak of how when their kid watched the Olympics and turned to their parents and said ‘Mummy, I’m going to go to the Olympics one day and win a gold medal’. How many of us humour our kids with a ‘uh huh, of course you are‘ instead of going encouraging them to work hard to make their dream come true?
