Faith Like a Child (eBook)

Embracing Our Lives as Children of God

Lacy Finn Borgo (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2023 | 1. Auflage
176 Seiten
IVP Formatio (Verlag)
978-1-5140-0399-2 (ISBN)

Infos

Embrace the invitation of childlike faith. A well-known challenge of Jesus to his followers is to become like little children. But it's often difficult to remember the natural patterns of our childhood selves that enabled us to live freely in God's wonder-filled presence. Is childlike faith simply an unquestioning faith, or is it being present with ourselves in a way that invites healing and wholeness? Faith Like a Child considers Jesus' invitation to childlike faith and explores seven distinct ways of welcoming the child within. Offering wisdom from years of experience as a spiritual director with both adults and children, Lacy Finn Borgo explores practices to welcome and enliven your childhood self. Offering examples of what becoming like children could look like, Borgo invites you to take Jesus up on his offer to live more deeply into a relationship with God. As we welcome our childhood selves, we allow God to heal our wounds so we can live in freedom with Jesus as our companion.

Lacy Finn Borgo holds a doctor of ministry degree in leadership and spiritual formation and a certificate in spiritual direction from Portland Seminary, where she also teaches classes on spiritual direction and spiritual formation. In addition to her practice with adults, she provides spiritual direction for children at Haven House, a transitional housing facility for homeless families. Lacy also serves on the Renovaré US ministry team. She lives in Montrose, Colorado, with her family and assorted animals.

Autor

Lacy Finn Borgo teaches and provides spiritual direction with adults and children through Renovaré, Mercy Center Burlingame, and the Companioning Center. She especially loves meeting with children at Haven House, a transitional facility for families without homes. She holds a doctor of ministry degree in leadership and spiritual formation and a certificate in spiritual direction from Portland Seminary. Borgo is also the author of Spiritual Conversations with Children.

Textauszug

It’s important to know the way to enter when visiting my parents. From the driveway, all you can see is the garage. But if you enter that garage and weave through the cars, tools, and unimaginable array of glass canning jars, you’ll see a staircase at the back leading to a humble door. Over that door is a ceramic sign that reads “Bienvenidos a casa de los abuelos.” In English, the sign—a nod to their Texas roots and my mother’s love of Mexican culture—reads, “Welcome to the grandparents’ house.” If you take these grandparents up on their welcome and enter that door, you might feel like you’ve come home. For they’ll be grandparents to you, as they are to everyone they know. Children and adults far and wide call them Big Mama and Grand. They embody the word welcome.

The word welcome comes to us from the eighth century and means “a wished-for guest.” The word itself combines two parts: “to will or desire” and “to come.” Woven within the word is an acknowledgment of the will to choose the presence of another. Welcome then requires an intentional action, a literal coming together of those who have been separate.

Welcome can be found throughout Scripture, both in the Hebrew Scriptures and in the New Testament. In Genesis, God welcomed—that is, desired and then acted on that desire—the world into existence. Eve welcomed Adam into human intimacy. God welcomed Abraham into friendship. Joshua welcomed a nation into a home. Rahab welcomed strangers into freedom. Ruth welcomed her mother-in-law into the family. Samuel welcomed God into speech. Mary welcomed God into her body. And Jesus? Jesus is all welcome. The Gospels tell us that Jesus welcomed women, men, and children into a way of being that birthed new life. The welcome that Jesus continues to offer reweaves all that we once thought separate.

Our welcomes are all connected: how we welcome our childhood selves is connected to how much we welcome the children in front of us, which is connected to how much we welcome the Christ child. And to welcome the Christ child is to welcome humanity itself. Children are the most human among us. They are the most present, most authentic, and most connected with the least effort and intention.

The incarnation is the foundation for the holy act of becoming human. Jesus’ life showed us that each developmental stage can be a place of holy delight. He was a child who did childlike and childish things. In him was the delight, awe, and wonder of discovery. He who knew all things experienced them afresh with a human body. He experienced life as an infant, a toddler, a child, a tween, and an adolescent. He encountered the same fears and worries and existential questions that we do.

As we welcome our own childhood selves, we welcome the humanity of Jesus. And in that welcoming, we find a companion for life. And further, when we welcome our own childhood selves and the Christ child, we will be more able to welcome children in our own lives. The act of welcoming involves a presence filled with acceptance, compassion, and empathy. When we feel with others and accept them, our level of desire for connection deepens. When our childhood memories hold places of fear and rejection, we wall off our childhood selves, and our welcome to children suffers.

BECOMING LIKE CHILDREN

Back when my children were very young and my soul was lonely, I gathered a group of women once a month in my home for dinner and a book discussion. Dinner was on my grandmother’s fine china, and the food was Colorado luxurious, plenty of it and hearty for winter, worth lingering over for hours. Some of us found childcare, others brought their littles. I remember a random comment made while chatting at the dining room table.

“When Jesus said, ‘You must become like children to enter the kingdom of God,’ surely he didn’t mean that,” one mother said, pointing to her son—who was picking his nose and wiping it on my couch. We all laughed that kind of laugh that said, “We hear you, sister, and thank God that’s your kid.”

We are made for experiencing God. Our first and most natural inclination as children is to connect with God in deeply uniting yet often ordinary ways. We adults have much to learn. This book will explore what it looks like to re-member (to revisit and revive what has been part of us) our childhood selves, to let the Spirit heal the childhood wounds that have calloused our hearts. We will re-member the natural patterns of our childhood selves that enabled us to live with freedom in God’s wonder-filled presence. We will unpack seven general ways of being that are natural to childhood and suggest healing spiritual practices that can help us grow a whole life with God. We will begin by exploring a shape of spiritual formation that addresses both the wonder we were born with and the wounds that could use some tender care. We will revisit what it looks like to develop a healthy attachment to God and how to cultivate that attachment through play, imagination, creativity, wonder, humor, and simply paying attention.

Each of us must do this essential work, and especially those of us who work or live with children—because children can spot a fake at fifty paces. We can only accompany children where we have gone. If we haven’t re-membered our childhood selves, the distance between ourselves and the children in front of us will grow.

CHILDHOOD AS A WISDOM WAY

“Aunt Polly, would you tell me one of your earliest memories?” I asked while shoveling Milky Way cake into my mouth as fast as possible—I needed a free hand to take notes.

“That’s a hard one . . . let me think,” she replied. Even well into her nineties, her mind was as sharp as her cane.

Family reunions in the Ringener (my mom’s side of the family) way are mainly about cake. There might be brisket, and various versions of potato salad, but there will always be cake. And there will be stories, tall Texas tales that are mostly true. The story I heard that day from my great-aunt Polly stirred something deep in me. I was just beginning to wonder about our early experiences of God and those tender memories that we hold dear throughout our lives: the memories that we may never tell another soul, but that we tell ourselves during hard times, when our knees become wobblier than we’d like.

She reminisced to me:

I remember it was a gray day, and I knew it had been raining because there was mud puddles everywhere. My mama had died, and on this day they were burying her. Her casket was in the back of the wagon and all the adults were walking behind it to the cemetery. I wasn’t more than four or five years old, so I was playin’ in the water, jumpin’ in the puddles. I heard one of the aunties say, “Poor little girl, don’t even know her mama died.” I overheard her and thought, “I know my Mama is safe with God.” I wasn’t sad and I wasn’t scared.

When I first heard this, I too easily dismissed her experience, falling into the same assumptions as the aunties, thinking she didn’t understand the gravity of the situation. It’s true that children don’t fully understand death, but maybe they know more about God than adults have previously understood. Could it be that Polly already encountered God in her young life? Could it be that overheard snippets of Jesus stories enlivened her imagination and cultivated a connection with God? Maybe little five-year-old Polly understood what was necessary for the moment. Maybe her young faith held her in that knowing.

ENGAGING THIS BOOK

In this book we will be exploring the ways of children and reengaging with our own memories of childhood. Do be gentle with yourself. Some memories that come into the light of Christ might be full of delight and forgotten joy, but some might remind you of wounds long buried. Walk gently and let the Spirit lead. Deep healing of tender places can’t be rushed or ramrodded. Go slow, go easy.

At the end of each chapter is a smorgasbord of practices to reunite you with your childhood self and the eternal one who loved you into being. Choose one practice, dear friend, and let it work deeply into who you are. There is no such thing as spiritual Olympics, and anyone who tells you differently is selling you something. (Yes, I know you bought this book. The stick in my eye is quite bothersome.) You can return to the other practices at a later time. My hope is that you will wander through these practices over and over for the next two decades, just long enough to grow young again.

Two tips as you begin: first, be around children. If you don’t live with any, you can volunteer to teach the children at your church, or volunteer to help a child learn to read in an after-school program, or volunteer to babysit for some tired-looking parents you know. I can describe children’s unique ways of being and offer strategies for you to live out these ways, but spending time with children will lead you much deeper. I’m a better typist, but they know the way by heart. Simple observation and engagement will go a long way. Second, find a traveling companion—a soul friend who can listen and help you to hear yourself and God. These friends will stay with us in the hard spots and celebrate our gains. A formal relationship of this kind is called spiritual direction; if you are looking...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 9.5.2023
• Verlagsort: Lisle
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Religion / Theologie ► Christentum ► Kirchengeschichte
• Themenwelt: Religion / Theologie ► Christentum ► Moraltheologie / Sozialethik
• Schlagworte: Attachement Theory • Childhood issues • childhood self • childhood wound • Childlike faith • Christian Faith • Discipleship • Healing • healing the inner child • holistic • Inner Child • Spiritual direction • spiritual disciplines • Spiritual Formation • spiritual growth
• ISBN-10: 1-5140-0399-6 / 1514003996
• ISBN-13: 978-1-5140-0399-2 / 9781514003992