I Wonder

I can tend to be a pretty driven person. I'm up at 5, scurrying
through a bevy of personal errands before Jada wakes up around 7 or 8
in the morning, and returning to scurry mode in the couple hours of
awake time I have after Jada goes down around 7 or 8 at night. Even
in between, when I'm watching Jada, sometimes I can be driven: I've
been known to feed her a meal while I'm myself eating, plus cooking
for the next meal, plus listening to the radio, plus doing a crossword
puzzle.

So it may come as a surprise (it's been a surprise to me, too) that
sometimes, every once in a while, when I'm watching Jada I actually do
slow down. One of the great things about having a kid is that every
so often, you get to see the world from a kid's perspective. That is
to say, you reclaim the emotion of wonder. Wonder is what I think
Jesus is looking for when He challenges His followers to come to Him
as children.

Wonder is lost in the lives of most adults. Some of this is good:
when we say goodbye to a dear friend, we don't wonder if we'll ever
see them again, because we know from experience that we will, while a
child might very well wonder, because he lacks that experience. But
some of this is most certainly bad: we have coated our hearts with
cynicism and callousness, insulating ourselves from feeling so as to
insulate ourselves from pain.

Ah, but what wonderful things we miss out as adults by numbing
ourselves in this way. And so I have been pleasantly surprised to
find myself reclaiming this sense of wonder when I spend time with
Jada. She'll pick up a twig and study it intently; you can almost
hear the synapses in her brain firing, as she tries to compare it to
previous information she's collected. She'll approach a dog to pet it
and it will suddenly lick her face, and she is immediately flooded
with uneasy fear mixed with absolute delight. She'll watch a bird
hop, hop, hop toward her, pick up a crumb of food on the ground, and
then dart up into the sky and up, up, and away to a faraway branch,
and you can tell she is wondering.

And I wonder along with her. In those times, my inherent drivenness,
my mindless enslavement to the clock and to my schedule and to an
internal ticking, all of that just fades away. Life slows down as I
watch my little one take it all in. And I am taking it all in with
her. In wonderment.