through the eyes of a child

“I’ve been watching you. You are working really hard.”

Amidst piles of books and stacked CD’s, I peered over my glasses at him.

That young Sanor boy.

His young eyes brimming with a divine intensity. Not the weird kind of poser intensity that some would affect who imagine themselves prophets and spiritual warriors with a message and mission. Please, Lord, less of them.

Unassuming.

Piercing.

Real.

I think I would have listened and responded to anything he said at that moment, the unpresuming spring sparkling as it was.

“I’ve been watching you.”

Depending on who makes such a statement, the context and the tone, that could be downright creepy. But for me it was a faint echo of what Hagar must have felt like by that well she had not seen. The well of the One Who Sees Me. Slightly unnerving, actually. But deeply comforting.

I wonder. Do such young eyes simply live in, observe more of the thin places of this world that we who have progressed chronologically (note I didn’t say “grown up” or “matured” for that would be assuming way too much for all of us)? “Of such is the kingdom of heaven.” Maybe that means more than childhood innocence or the “nobody” status of children in that culture. Perhaps it’s a nod to the connection of children to realities the rest of us are too busy or out of touch to detect. Perhaps young Samuel wasn’t such an abberation after all. It was Ray’s daughter Karin in Field of Dreams that first saw “the baseball man” out in the field. Every time I watch that scene where she gently interjects “Dad, there’s a baseball man out in the field” to her preoccupied father, it hits me.

So thank you, Abba, for bringing me to such a thin place through the eyes of a child who peered in at me over my piles of books.

My own field of dreams.

photo courtesy of chris cappozziello

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