Like a Little Child
A different take...
I just listened to our elders’ quorum lesson for this week. It’s the talk by Elder Jeffrey R. Holland from April conference titled “As a Little Child.” The scriptural text he used for this sermon is Matthew 18: 2-4—
And Jesus called a little child unto him, and set him in the midst of them,
And said, Verily I say unto you, Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.
Whosoever therefore shall humble himself as this little child, the same is greatest in the kingdom of heaven.
I have always found this passage to to be confusing, based on my interactions with my own children and as a teacher. Elder Holland’s talk compels me to look deeper for greater understanding about the meaning of humility.
When I think of little children, I don’t think of humility. For the most part, when children are infants, all they really know is whether their most basic needs are being met. Are they hungry, wet, cold, too hot, etc? They react to love and kindness. They respond to it, but they don’t return it. Many years ago, I approached a friend who was holding his newborn baby. He looked sleep-deprived and a bit worn from a sleepless night. I asked jovially, “Whatcha got there, Dad?” He looked at the kid said with reflection, “A small alimentary canal.” I laughed, understanding his meaning.
Another friend, an Arabic linguist, once told me that the word “child” in Arabic was the same word as “freeloader” — but, I digress.
From age two until late in the teen years, children are inherently selfish. They aren’t maliciously so. Their brains have not yet developed a natural concern for the welfare of others. The universe revolves around them because they live entirely in their little heads.
When I was in first grade, there was a girl who was blinking her eyes repeatedly, saying, “Look everybody, I’m turning out the lights.” In her little child brain, she didn’t understand that, when she closed her eyes, the lights didn’t go out for the rest of us. Little children live inside their own minds and the rest of us are just actors in the play.
Little children start out as egotists. Everything is about them. In their minds, they are the best at everything they do. Nobody has ever drawn a more perfect crayon image of a house or a flower or a fire truck. If mother compliments one of her children on a drawing, the automatic response from the other children is automatically, “What about me?” That question is the number one concern of every small child. (Many people carry that concern into adulthood uncorrected.)
As a sports coach and a teacher, it’s a pain to deal with. It’s why I prefer to teach high school, not small children. As a Judo coach, I preferred teaching teens and adults. Little kids required too much attention to those little egos. In Judo, the whole purpose of the game is to throw someone on the ground with speed, force, and control. We train many techniques that are to be applied to do that. When a small child throws another, there are inevitably tears. They aren’t hurt, but their egos are bruised. Some of the older ones, maybe seven or eight, learn to feign injuries to cover the embarrassment of losing a match.
For two short intervals in my teaching career, I taught a class of fourth graders and another of fifth graders. I recently spent a few months teaching a fifth-grade class and the egos were totally out-of-control. The school didn’t want us to give failing grades to any child for fear of harming their self-esteem. Yet there were kids that simply did no work at all. If they did any, it was of such inattentiveness and poor quality, that it deserved a failing mark. Teachers had to avoid bruising the children’s egos. One ten year-old boy threw tantrums, throwing himself in the floor or stomping away pouting several times a day.
Some children, as they grow older, create elaborate, self-aggrandizing fantasies about themselves. One girl in my fifth grade class told me and all her classmates, she had the lead role in a play that was being put on by a community group. When I commented to her mother about this, how cool this was, her mother looked at me like I was crazy. The girl had just made the whole thing up.
When I think of little children and their behavior, that’s what I think of. The whole process of growing up and interacting with other people creates conflicts that expose our weaknesses, our self-centeredness, and forces us to correct ourselves. Unchecked, we grow up to be narcissistic a—holes.
I kind of liken it to the experience of polishing stones in a rock-polishing machine. You take some ordinary stones, even gravel from the street, toss it in the polisher and a few spoons full of an abrasive compound, and turn it on. The rocks tumble inside and collide with each other and the abrasive compound wears off sharp edges and smooths everything out. After enough time, you take the rocks out and they are smooth, shiny, even pretty.
Life is like a big rock-polisher and we tumble around inside it, crashing into one another, rubbing off the rough edges. We learn from the experience, to value others, to not hurt each others’ feelings, to not always want to be first or best at the expense of others. None of us undergo this process willingly. It’s sometimes painful. If we endure it well, we learn to be giving, not selfish; compassionate, not prideful. We learn to listen to wiser voices and try to avoid future buffetings.
When Jesus says for us to become as little children, I struggle with that because little children, to me, are the very essence of what it means to be a natural man. King Benjamin said:
For the natural man is an enemy to God, and has been from the fall of Adam, and will be, forever and ever, unless he yields to the enticings of the Holy Spirit, and putteth off the natural man and becometh a saint through the atonement of Christ the Lord, and becometh as a child, submissive, meek, humble, patient, full of love, willing to submit to all things which the Lord seeth fit to inflict upon him, even as a child doth submit to his father.
His description of children as being “humble, patient, full of love, and willing to submit to all things” doesn’t describe my experience with children. If I would be realistic about it, I’d have to say that the childlike qualities I think the Lord would really want us to model are curiosity and a willingness to ask questions.
One of the first phrases my youngest grandson learned was “What’s that?” He’d point to everything in the room, wanting to know what it was called. Even before he could form the words, he wanted to be able to understand and identify things. He was persistent in asking and he readily accepted whatever we told him.
One of my daughters always used to ask about what various animals did and the sounds they made. Once she asked about cows and I told her that cows go “Moo!”and that they stink. That stuck with her for a long time. She was barely old enough to talk, but she’d tell you that cows moo and stink.
I think that’s a childlike quality the Lord would want us to have. I think he likes us to ask him questions. He’d probably like it if we listened to the answers and acted upon them like a child would do.
There’s another quality, of innocence, that we often associate with gullibility. A child will pretty much accept whatever answer you give them without second-guessing, depending on their age. They will trust what you say without question. They have to learn a certain degree of wariness to survive later on. They have to learn from sad experience that not everyone has their best interests in mind. With God, we can trust him without reservation. The wariness we learn to apply to others needs to be suspended when it comes to the Lord. This kind of childlike nature is useful when interacting with him.
Elder Holland’s talk gives us much to consider about how we interact with Deity. In my experience, though, we are much like his five year-old granddaughter, who taught her three year-old brother a valuable lesson by biting him back, so he’d know what it felt like. If that’s what it means to become like a little child, I think we’ll be OK.
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Lovely, thought-provoking, and honest.