In the things that matter most I long to be childish once again. To hear the words of Jesus, and feel his welcoming embrace, and simply stand with wide-eyed wonder and innocent acceptance. I long for the scales to fall from my eyes, and with untainted vision see the grace of the gospel in all its fullness wash away the stain of skepticism.

Two things I long for. Two things lost, but not forgotten.

The childish wonder I saw in a lizard as it lay warming itself in a dust speckled shaft of sunlight. The eyes of my children as they drank my words that fuelled imaginations of a world yet to be seen.

Adulthood is conditioned toward sclerosis. As I speed toward a half century of life, I feel a hardening creeping toward me as the sun begins to dip beyond the zenith of my days of wandering. When did I cautiously handle every new discovery, swill every new taste before swallowing? When did my default setting switch to “let’s wait and see”? When did I become such a skeptic?

Skepticism is exhausting. Always looking for the angle, the sell, the loop-hole, the attached strings. Always listening for the subliminal message, the ring of falsehood, the unmistakable tone of sensationalism. Always expecting the let down, the “told you so”, the uncovering of lies, the sting of disappointment. I grieve the passing of childish days, where innocent wondering consumed my mind but never wearied my soul.

I grieve too, the passing chapter of parenting that saw the same hardening in my children. I wistfully smile as I recall the wide-eyed excitement my children lived in, long before disappointments marred their vision; yesterday, when skepticism lay undiscovered and simple pleasures were simply that. Both they and I, when I too was like them, saw the world in wholeness, sharp edged and clear. We had untainted eyes. But those days have slipped away.

Skepticism is like a microscope whose magnification is constantly increased: the sharp image that one begins with finally dissolves, because it is not possible to see ultimate things: their existence is only to be inferred.— Stanislaw Lem

Now, with brief glimpses of “if, buts, and maybes”, we feverishly build an image of the world that won’t crumble beneath our feet. Forever groping about, not trusting the ground with our full weight, anxiously expecting to pitch forward into the darkness, knowing that those who promise to break our fall probably won’t. What a wretched existence we’ve constructed for ourselves.

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