I met a boy recently.
He has dazzled me. He is beautiful and handsome and charming.
He has some of the biggest, sweetest brown eyes I’ve ever seen in my life, and I can’t help but want to make him smile. I want to see him laugh.
He has this incredible personality: the kind that’s infectiously joyful and silly and he makes you want to join in on his fun. He dances and he gets excited about things and he’s a free spirit.
He’s three years old and he lives in an abandoned train station full of muck and grime and people who neglect sweet babies like him.
He’s picked up everyday and brought to the center where we live, usually wearing nothing but an oversized shirt and a runny nose. He’s given a bath and clothes to play in while his ragged shirt is cleaned and hung up to dry. He gets to eat and play and run and dance and eat again and color and watch cartoons and terrorize his playmates and just be a little boy.
Two days ago the kids made paper airplanes, and my pal was tossing his around without a care in the world. For some reason he began unfolding it. Maybe to satisfy the curiosity of what made it fly. Maybe just to scratch the itch. You know, the one little boys seem to possess that causes them to take stuff apart just for the sake of taking stuff apart. Whatever the reason, he then had in his tiny little hands what was a paper airplane and then all of a sudden it wasn’t anymore.
He looked up at me with those eyes. The ones I was telling you about: big pools of chocolate and warmth that make you want to hug away all the neglect and hurt he experiences. He lifted up his wrinkled piece of paper, and gave me this look that said, “put it back together”.
“Really, man?” I asked him. “You had a perfectly good plane and then you took it apart and now you want me to fix it for you? You’re silly, you know that?”
I’m confident he understood every word.
Well…confident-ish.
Charmagne looked over at me and said, “I wonder if that’s how God feels about us”.
And I wondered, too.
Wondered about this incredible God, who builds things and crafts things and constructs things with his infinitely creative and fun and inspiring mind. Things meant to be enjoyed by us, His most prized creation. Things meant for our ultimate good, for our playful hearts, for our joyful souls. Things that we toss around and take apart.
We take his gifts and play with them and then we disassemble them. We then look at what we have and compare it to what we had and we lift our eyes, our big, child-like eyes, and we ask him to fix it.
It must be exasperating having to clean up our messes all the time, and yet He does it. He looks down and sees our need and our desires and He doesn’t turn away. He reaches out and helps and loves and repairs.
In that moment, when this sweet little boy was looking at me and asking me to help him, God said “that’s me and you, kiddo. It’s the same. I love you like that. Freely and abundantly and zealously. Believe it.”
That’s the God I adore and serve. That’s the God I’ve gone across the world to know and love.
That’s the God I crave and trust.
He sees us and doesn’t leave us to figure it out. He loves us enough to look past the junk and the mess and sees people He loves like crazy.
Think about that. The creator of the universe loves you like crazy, and there’s nothing you could ever do to lose it…nothing you could ever do to earn it.
If I didn’t have that hope, I would not be able to survive looking into my pal’s sweet brown eyes and see a depth there that a three year old should not possess. I couldn’t bear it if I didn’t know that Jesus is reaching out and saying, “I’ll fix all the airplanes you ever take apart, because I love you no matter what”.
But I do have that hope, and it is one that surpasses all knowledge and understanding and it sustains me. It gives me breath that fills more than my lungs; it fills my spirit and tells me “I will be with you always, until the end of the age” (Matthew 28:20 ESV).
Oh, what a promise.
Oh, what a hope.
