Exploring and Enjoying the Child Within

“It’s never too late to have a happy childhood.”

— Tim Robbins

Far too many adults had hellish childhoods, whether through abuse or neglect, significant circumstantial suffering, or by being required to live a life a parent wanted them to live, etc. There are countless examples where childhood was the ruination of a life God had commanded and brought into being.

Let’s get this straight: the fact we live and breathe is God’s blessing.

Only by God’s command is it so that we live. Yet, due to many people’s circumstances or carers they had forgettable childhoods that only served to scourge the rest of life, or so they thought.

Let’s turn that on its head.

Knowing God’s Blessing: We Are Alive/Freedom Is Ours!

The fact we live and breathe is God’s blessing. Because it is never too late to turn our lives around, it is never too late to enjoy a beautiful childhood—one that God would have wanted for us. But this would be a childhood in our minds and hearts—a place we can go anytime.

Those who did have horrendous childhoods have probably become accustomed to avoiding enquiry of that area of their lives. Well, to explore and enjoy the child within really has nothing to do with picking at old scars and digging through the trash of the hurts left far behind in our wake.

We are alive and we have God’s blessing.

We have minds that furnish our hearts with wonderful feeling imagery if we will venture beneath the surface of our hurts, into the person God made us to be; to explore and enjoy that sense of childhood that would have been perfect. We can imagine ourselves in the garden of God. In that garden everything is friendly and everything is safe, and there is much joy and peaceful laughter.

In that garden is pure freedom. And fear doesn’t exist there.

We are alive and we have these minds that God has given us. The mind, if it thinks a certain way, can bless the heart in untold ways.

Exploring and enjoying the child within has nothing to do with our childhoods. But it has plenty to do with the way we are constructed by God. There is nothing hateful within us because we are fearfully and wonderfully made (Psalm 139). When we discover, afresh, that God in his wisdom has made us for his delight we learn to accept ourselves as we are.

Exploring and enjoying the child within is not about limits. God delimits us from our worldly understanding, as we can enjoy plumbing the depths of our imaginations.

We have freedom in our thoughts. We are not bonded to what we think, though we often think we are. We can break free, because this force for God is abundantly more powerful than any negative force.

The more we explore and enjoy the child within, the more we might enter into God’s courts with the childlike faith, ready to trust and obey. And God would be pleased with that.

© 2012 S. J. Wickham.