A child asks an average of 447 questions a day
Be like a Child, Jesus says
They are the greatest in heaven
The wonderer
The messy, giggling leap-before-they-lookers
So many churches mourn
that they do not have children
But I do not see them attending sports games
or sponsoring tech and college scholarships
I don’t see churches at school plays
Why God?
If the kingdom of God is like childhood?
Why isn’t the church full of coloring
and children dancing down the aisles?
If the Kingdom of Heaven is children?
I got in so much trouble, Jesus, you know,
Because every time I got asked in an interview
how I would bring in young families
I would ask what the church was doing for the families…
Where do you children congregate,
if you’re a congregation?
I’d ask. Because if you’ve been on the floor with kiddos–
I don’t have to tell you, that is truly heaven.
You don’t have to be the greatest to be with kids
They don’t care if your are the best storyteller,
or the most beautiful person in the room
or if your the most famous
I’ll let you in on a secret, when you spend time with them
You are all of those things
That is how to get to paradise
Instead of asking who is the greatest
or how to get there, Jesus tells
us to spend time with our children
Not to ban books, not to change them
to love them and be more like them
How about that ?
Feel free to use/share/adapt with credit to Pastor Katy Stenta
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Author: katyandtheword
Pastor Katy has enjoyed ministry at New Covenant since 2010, where the church has solidified its community focus. Prior to that she studied both Theology and Christian Formation at Princeton Theological Seminary. She also served as an Assistant Chaplain at Trenton Psychiatric Hospital and as the Christian Educational Coordinator at Bethany Presbyterian at Bloomfield, NJ.
She is an writer and is published in Enfleshed, Sermonsuite, Presbyterian's today and Outlook. She writes prayers, liturgy, poems and public theology and is pursuing her doctorate in ministry in Creative Write and Pittsburgh Theological Seminary.
She enjoys working within and connecting to the community, is known to laugh a lot during service, and tells as many stories as possible. Pastor Katy loves reading Science Fiction and Fantasy, theater, arts and crafts, music, playing with children and sunshine, and continues to try to be as (w)holistically Christian as possible.
"Publisher after publisher turned down A Wrinkle in Time," L'Engle wrote, "because it deals overtly with the problem of evil, and it was too difficult for children, and was it a children's or an adult's book, anyhow?" The next year it won the prestigious John Newbery Medal.
Tolkien states in the foreword to The Lord of the Rings that he disliked allegories and that the story was not one.[66] Instead he preferred what he termed "applicability", the freedom of the reader to interpret the work in the light of his or her own life and times.
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