Finding Forever Land: Approaching the Kingdom with Childlike Faith

Chapter 2 - Freeze Tag

Welcome to Chapter Two of my book, ‘Finding Forever Land: Approaching the Kingdom with Childlike Faith’. As I mentioned last week, I’ll be posting this book, chapter by chapter as I write it. I hope God blesses you in reading it and I hope you’ll consider not just subscribing to 4N6 Ministries, but also commenting to let me know what you think (even if you don’t agree with me about something). And of course, all shares would be greatly appreciated to. I truly believe in the message of this book, which is why I’m sharing it free of charge as it comes together. It is the message, I say, that’s important. Not book sales or royalty payments. So, get into your Way-Back Machine and travel back in time with me today as we head to the most precious time in a child’s life…the playground at recess.

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You glance around the playground, biding your time. Waiting for your chance to nab the two remaining competitors. Jeff Jasper runs past you, laughing maniacally, just a few feet away. He’s like a cheetah. Fast as lightning. Agile as a squirrel. Not easy prey. Eugene Perry is well past the slide, monkey bars, and swing set, but not nearly as quick as Jeff. Shorter. Chunkier. Two left feet.

You grin. Dig the heel of your Zips brand sneakers into the soil—it’s the 1980s, by the way, and Zips, according to the Saturday morning commercials, were all about making you as fast as the Flash—and dash toward Eugene. Sherri Stephens, Mary Susan, Darby, and J.B. all stay glued in their place. Unmoving. Arms stiff in awkward positions. Spines bent in painfully difficult angles. Only their eyes and grins dare draw attention to themselves. You pay them no heed. They’re unimportant. Only two remain and for now, Eugene is your one and only target for the moment.

You’ll deal with Jeff last. If you’re lucky enough to do so before the bell rings and signals the end of recess.

Your legs pump as fast as they can go, quickly weaving in and out of the moving swings, avoiding the bodies flying as kids leap from the seats in hopes of reaching the stratosphere. You’re almost on top of your quarry. You can practically taste the sweat flinging from his brow as he glances back at you with horrific fear in his eyes. You reach out a hand, preparing yourself to strike, just as Eugene uncharacteristically feints left before dashing off to the right.

The ruse is enough to confuse you for a split second. You hesitate, try to swing around in time to lash out at your target. The awkwardness of your limbs twist as you do, and you tumble to the ground in a heap and a huff. Laughter erupts all around you, but you ignore it. You climb to your feet, wipe off your jeans, and look up once more. Your quarry is now on top of the slide, laughing loudest of all. Mocking you. You laugh to. This is far too much fun to let the setback get to you. You take several deep breaths, preparing for your next run, then the unthinkable happens. The terrible blare of the klaxon echoes from the direction of the school announcing the end of playtime. Students are required to return to their classes. Winded, yet elated, your friends unfreeze themselves from your icy touch and all scurry up the hill to the school building for further instruction into the boring old world of reality.

This is my typical memory of those days at recess playing Freeze Tag, one of the most fun games I played as a kid that didn’t require a ball or loads of imagination. For those who never played (I pity you. I really do.), it’s just like the game of Tag with the added bonus that whoever ‘It’ (the person chasing everyone) touches must freeze in place until the round is over and a new It is chosen. In short, the kids run around the schoolyard like tiny dynamos of energy while one of their peers chase them down and force them to stand in place—and in the exact same pose they were in—once they’re ‘tagged’. There are several variations to the game. In some iterations, any of the free roaming kids can run to their friends and unfreeze them with a touch of their hand, making It’s job infinitely more complex.

The game itself has many rules. Each iteration of the game adds even more to those rules. And every kid at play follows each of them to the absolute letter. To deviate from them one iota is to invite ridicule and jibes of “Cheater, cheater!” from their peers, which is a fate far worse than losing any game when it comes to the playground hierarchy.

Think back to those days when you were on the playground. Remember the rules. Remember the adherence your friends paid to those rules. Do you remember the scorn that would be leveled against those accused of cheating? It could be brutal, bordering on making the rule breaker a social pariah for a short period of time. Am I right?

Playground Justice

It’s weird to think about, but it’s true. There is a righteous justice system on any playground. Kids might disobey their parents from time to time. They might not always listen to their teachers. But when it comes to the rules of play, they can be veritable Wyatt Earps out there, standing tall astride the apex of that jungle gym in the center of the yard, shooting down anyone that so much as twitches out of place in a game of Freeze Tag.

So, what does that tell us, I wonder? What does it tell us about human nature? The nature of children and God?

To many of us, it might bring to mind William Golding’s first novel, Lord of the Flies, a strange and disturbing tale that examines the feral nature of humanity versus the restraints placed upon it by so-called civilization. In a nutshell, the book is about a group of children, evacuating their homes during the war, whose plane crashes into a desert island. Stranded and with all grownups being killed in the crash, these kids seek to survive by establishing their own form of civilization with a very rigid, and violent justice system.

For those of you who had this spring into your minds…kudos! You are well-rounded readers and perhaps have excellent taste in books (unless you were forced to read it in high school, in which case, kudos to your teachers!). But no, that’s not what I’m thinking of by bringing up this strict code of playground ethics at all.

Perhaps a better literary comparison to what I’m thinking about would be a contemporary of Golding’s in the form of C.S. Lewis. More specifically, in his book Mere Christianity, which was released two years earlier in 1952. Within Lewis’ tome of Christian apologetics, he spends a great deal of time discussing the idea of Natural Law. By this, he wasn’t referring to scientific laws or such, but rather a Law that is inscribed in each man and woman’s DNA that lets them know when something is right or wrong whether they understand why or not. In the book, Lewis posits that the first step to knowing the truth of God and Scripture is in that humanity simply knows when someone has done something bad to us. When something is unfair. When something just doesn’t seem quite right. We aren’t taught these things. They’re instinctive. We naturally sense injustice when it happens…mostly when it happens to us, but regardless, we know.

Lewis goes on to explain that this inherent code of good versus evil points to a divine law giver. A deity with strong values of justice. It is from this point that he attempts to prove the truth of Christianity to those who might be skeptical. In essence, the existence of natural law necessitates the existence of a natural law giver. This natural law giver, by His nature, must be our Creator, otherwise, how would His law be universally known. The only question from this point forward is which god placed this law into our DNA to begin with?

Of course, this concept is straight out of the books of Jeremiah and Hebrews. In Jeremiah 31:33 we learn: “This is the covenant I will make with the people of Israel after that time,” declares the LORD. “I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people.”

God tells Jeremiah that He will write His law on our hearts and place it in our minds. The writer of Hebrews reminds us of this promise as well[1], which would indicate that this promise wasn’t simply for a specific time, place, and people, but for the post-resurrection-of-Christ world, as well. This promise was not dependent on whether one was Jewish or Gentile, believer or unbeliever.

In Romans 2:12-16, Paul emphasizes this concept of genetically coded Law in everyone’s hearts when he is arguing with the Judaizers about whether the Gentiles should be required to follow the Law they, themselves, adhered to. He goes into a bit of a diatribe reminiscent of Jesus’s splinter vs log in one’s eye, but corroborates this idea that the Law is written on everyone’s hearts and points out those Gentiles who’ve never heard the Law of Moses, yet instinctively follows it.

The inescapable truth is that God has written His law on everyone’s hearts. If you were created by Him—and I daresay unless you’re a clone or an android or some other Star Trek gizmo, you were—His law is engrained into your very DNA as a human being. We can’t escape it. We can try to ignore it, sure, but ultimately it will be irrevocably part of who and what we are as God’s creatures.

So, let’s return to that playground. Let’s zoom in on that game of Freeze Tag. Pay careful attention to little Sherri Stephens standing stock still with right leg twisted at nearly a forty-five-degree angle and left arm stretch out behind her in mid-pivot. Her eyes sparkle with joy as she witnesses Jeff Jasper zoom past It, zigging and zagging, while mocking It’s inability to catch him. She giggles. But she doesn’t move a centimeter other than her diaphragm with each guffaw.

Her friends, Darby, Mary Sue, and J.B. do the same. They stand unmoving. Statue-like other than their eyes and bellies as they laugh at the antics of the other players. J.B.’s nose itches. He desperately wants to scratch it—maybe with just a quick shrug of the shoulder—and yet, that would break the rules. He’d be out of the game for good if he so much as wiggles his nose. Mary Sue needs to use the restroom, and yet, she’d rather explode than break the rules of the game.

Think about it. Remember your days on the playground. Am I wrong about this? I don’t think so. No matter how we might want to explain it, there was a very real sense of justice during recess with firm, yet fair punishment carried out, not by teachers or school administrators, but by the students themselves. Want to be shunned? Cheat.

And while the rules of the game, I’ll admit, must be learned by each child, this sense of right and wrong…of cheating and fair play…are engrained in each of them without anyone having to verbalize it. It’s just there. Natural law. DNA morality. God’s code of ethics. It’s seen for all to witness on a school playground. Wyatt Earp with a yo-yo and a hopscotch grid dispensing justice at recess. There’s nothing more important to a child—outside of the need to have fun—than fairness. And therefore, justice.

Guilty Eyes

Still unconvinced? Or maybe attribute this natural sense of fair play and justice is merely an artifact of playground social conditioning? Peer pressure? Then imagine your own child (if you don’t have one, the following scenario is going to be pretty easy to imagine), before they matured to the ripe old age of six or seven, when they reach what many Christians called “the age of accountability”—or the age in which a kid not only knows the difference between right and wrong, but truly understands the consequences. I’m talking about picturing your child at the ages between three and six.

Got a picture of them in your head? Good.

Now imagine you and your spouse, sitting on the couch watching television. Your child comes into the living room, dragging their feet in slow, languid steps. Their hands clasp behind their back. Their eyes stair at their feet. Maybe their lips are showing a guilty pout. You ask if anything’s wrong and your child simply shakes their head in the negative. But they still stand there, staring down at the floor. You sit up, knowing that something is truly amiss. You pause the Netflix show you’ve been watching and eye your kid suspiciously. You nudge them again about what’s troubling them and they only shrug in reply.

Eventually, you get up and walk through the house until you find it. The hallway wall, just outside their bedroom. It’s now covered in colorful pictures of stick figure astronauts battling wonky-looking dinosaurs in space. You know they’re in space because of all the stars, moons, and at least one Saturn with its rings circling the action.

Slightly amused by their artistic talents, you screw on a disappointed face and call the child to you. Once again, they amble to you with reluctant steps. You point to the artwork and demand to know why they did it. At first, they might deny it was even them. Maybe they blame their one-year-old brother, asleep in his crib. Maybe they pass the buck to the ghost that haunts your house. But eventually, tears pouring from their eyes, they fess up.

Now here’s the deal. Perhaps this is the very first instance of your kid using your drywall as a canvass worthy of the Louvre. It’s never been a discussion you’ve had with your child before because there was never a need to tell them that such an act was a no-no. That it was vandalism. That it lowered property value and was a pain to clean up. There’s no way your child should know that such an act was off limits.

And yet, they came into the living room while you were trying to watch TV and practically confessed right there on the spot. They had been beside their self with guilt. They knew—without having to be told by anyone—that they had done wrong. And they had basically come to tell you what they did even though they might not have known why.

Now, you might say that this is a completely fictional story, but you’d be wrong. I’m pretty sure I did something similar when I was a kid myself. I know for a fact that a good friend’s kid did this when she was about this age. I’m willing to bet (if gambling wasn’t a sin, that is) that many of you have experienced similar instances in your lives as well.

Natural Law—or the law written on each of our hearts—is quite evident when one pays attention to the behavior of children. And if there is Natural Law, there must be a Natural Law Giver. And if this Law Giver has access to our hearts and DNA to inscribe this law, then this Being must be our Creator. Or God.

As the Bell Rings

So, the question that springs to my mind when contemplating all this is: What happened to that sense of divine law in us? What happened to that innate sense of right and wrong? What happened to our stalwart defense of fair play and divine justice?

Before I continue, I think it’s important to note that I’m not talking human justice here, which is weak and as waffling as the wind. I’m not talking about social justice or even judicial, legal forms of justice (i.e. crime, lawsuits, etc.). We all have maintained a certain sense of that sort of flawed justice within our psyches. No, I’m talking about the disappearance of an innate sense of God’s divine justice. Perfect justice. Holy justice. A justice that is both impartial and absolute. The kind that can only be found this side of Heaven on a child’s playground.

What happened to it?

Easy. The class bell rang. Recess ended. We grew up.

And with that growth came both human wisdom and cynicism. There’s nothing inherently wrong with human wisdom, but when bolstered by pride for that same wisdom, it can be outright disastrous. Just ask Solomon!

And cynicism? Let me just say, “Stop it. Stop with the cynicism already!” Life’s hard enough as it is. Why compound it with the unnecessary distrust and displeasure that cynicism brings us. It’s a sure-fire way to smother the childlike joy from our lives!

Truth is, God has written His law on our hearts. In our DNA. That law—God’s justice—has never left us. Might as well believe you lost your curly hair (um, okay…so I’m losing some of them, but that’s not the point) or your hazel eyes or that nose that looks so much like your mama’s. We simply can’t lose this heart-engraved law.

But with age comes inevitable hearing loss. Loss of vision. If you’re like me, you’ve become nearsighted and only able to read things right in front of you (although, now I’m having to use reading glasses for that as well). Point is grownups have a heck of a time perceiving the supernatural. God’s law is, as difficult as it might be to accept this, supernatural in origin. It goes beyond time and space. It existed long before creation. How do I know this? Because God’s law is merely a picture of God’s nature. His attributes. His profile stats. God’s law is every bit as supernatural as He is because it is part of who He is.

This is lesson number one of having childlike faith: we must learn to see and listen with the eyes and ears of a child in order to perceive the goodness of God. The faithfulness of God. And, I’ll just say it, we must learn to see and listen with the eyes and ears of a child so that, through that engrained law in our hearts, we can know for certain that God truly exists.

That is the starting point. The beginning of everything having to do with faith. No matter what Hollywood might tell you in its many movies, simply having faith in “something” isn’t enough. Our faith must be focused on the only thing that truly deserves our faith…Yahweh. Adonai. The LORD, God Almighty. Just ask your kids. They’ll tell you I’m right.

[1] Hebrews 10:16-17