Little Ones

I can barely keep up with her these days. I get tired just watching her, because she never stops MOVING. She twists, turns, rolls. She scoots her way along the ground like a lizard, or like a little crippled person. She has an amazing reach. I’ll think, good thing that’s out of the way, and then the next minute it’s in her mouth. I think part of this is her truly impossible degree of flexibility. Holding her feels like grasping a wriggling eel; she’s always twisting around to get or look at something of interest. Items of interest, in case anyone is Christmas shopping early, would probably rank:

1. Paper, particularly tags.
2. Keys (real ones; I bought her a set of fake plastic ones but she has no interest).
3. Anything that is going in my mouth.
4. The cat’s tails.
5. Anything she can tear cheerfully apart into little pieces, like tissues or flowers.

I think sometimes about all that she doesn’t understand, and it blows my mind. She doesn’t understand that when she rips a tulip apart, it is destroyed. That when she drops things, someone has to pick it up. She has absolutely no sense of self-preservation; that it might not be good to reach for something sharp or lean too far over the edge of a bed. She has absolutely no idea how much we do to keep her well.

It makes me think about my relationship with God in a new way. When I think of God as my father, it’s mostly in the way my father was to me as an older child and adult. I don’t remember much of anything before I was five. But surely God is also a father to me the way we are to E now. I get a glimpse of what the psalmist meant when he wrote that God’s ways and understanding are higher than ours. He sees the things I do that no one else notices. He understands the bigger picture, the purpose behind events, in a way beyond my usual thinking. He provides and is alongside me even when I take it for granted.

And in the end, he loves me. I think about how Jesus said to let the little children come to him, little babies like E who are too young to understand many things, to know how to act. I think about how much I love her despite and because of all that. And I’m a little closer to understanding how God loves me.