One thing I’ve learned so far from my 9-week-old son, James, is how fun it is to be an adult—and how shameful.
We get to eat anything we want, really, and somehow we find a way to complain or feel let down by it. He eats milk, and he’s always happy about it.
He doesn’t like when his tummy hurts him, but he’s never spit milk out upset at its taste.
Adults have the ability to jump on an airplane, fly to Yosemite, hike the nation’s most beautiful trails, but somehow we have found a million reasons why we can’t go. James can only go where we carry him, and oftentimes he’s confined to the car seat.
As James grows up he will be able to enjoy more and more wonderful things in life, and I can’t wait to introduce those to him, but the most important lesson I’m profoundly afraid of teaching him is the art of contentment—the art of purposeful joy.
I have a feeling he will end up teaching me more about it than I will him.
That’s not something you learn in school or higher education; there’s not a class called “Enjoying Life.” We all know the catch-phrase about making lemonade out of lemons, but few of us take it seriously.
What happens as we age is we come to expect certain things. A lot of adults don’t have the ability go to the bathroom by themselves, but when is the last time you thanked God for the ability to have a bowel movement?
Children expect nothing, but as they age, that changes, and they quickly learn what to expect, what they can demand from their parents—and their world.
I’ve heard it’s called the terrible two’s, and I’m bracing myself for that phase.
That is when we all first started exercising our will, trying to get the best for ourselves we could, doubting our parents’ knowledge and goodness.
That pernicious evil is common to mankind and it seeps in, not through immorality but through our treasures and blessings, and it seeks to strangle the child-like joy within.
The more we get, the more we want.
Now there actually happens to be a class about this, and it’s in the theology department.
There is a parable similar to this that Jesus told the religious leaders of His day. It’s commonly known as the parable of the prodigal son, because most people focus on the younger son, who runs away and lives in immorality, only to return when he has hit rock bottom.
But there is another son, the older brother, and he is more evil than his immoral little brother.
Why?
Because he can’t stand it when the father forgives his younger brother.
He is most of us.
The older brother was sedated by the good in his life, whereas the younger brother was passionate, given life by the drama of forgiveness.
Which leads me to a point that I anchor a lot of columns in: life is broken and it’s not broken near the edges, but right up the middle, right in the midst of what we are most proud of.
This is a problem an order of magnitude greater than the standard problems of productivity, math, and organizational leadership that business literature focuses on.
It’s a problem whose solution has greater potential to change our lives than anything business literature ever hoped to accomplish.
If we can solve the evil problem within, we too can become children again.
It all starts there.
We can be humble, better leaders. We can become happy, content with little, not forced to make a sale to satiate our greed. We don’t have to overspend or keep up with the Jones’s. We can rest and find peace.
It all starts by running to the Father—to forgive and be forgiven.
Then, and only then, will the pieces fall into place, and we can learn to be kids again.
There’s no shame in that.