Things kids say...

Yesterday when I woke my 6 year old son up for school I was greeted with a response that I have grown accustom to. You see my son has a part of his brain that I am convinced no one else has, or at least no one else uses. When he goes to sleep at night he logs a whole bunch of one phrase ideas in his brain that he heard from that day. He saves them like a hard drive, and for some reason when he wakes up in the morning they are right there waiting to be used with reckless abandon. This particular morning he woke up and said.

"Did you know that people can die with their eyes open."

I have no idea why he decided this was the right way to greet me on a Wednesday morning, but that was it, not hi daddy, not good morning, no he had been intentionally logging this phrase on his memories hard drive so that he could spout it to the first person he saw the next day.

It's pretty amazing how the human brain works. It can remember and re use things that we had no idea we were logging.

As we get older we learn how to control our brain, and it's functions, ultimately leading to a lifestyle that intentionally keeps people at bay. We use only parts of our brain that are safe, and we seem to learn how to keep at bay the parts that might open us up to public rejection. My son Neal still has not learned that skill yet. He says what he thinks, and does not filter a single word. I can't help but wonder what our world would be like if we never grew up and learned how to hide our emotions the way we do. What if we were all walking around saying the first thing that came to our mind.

For example, a man with a white beard walks by, everyone things, hey that guy looks like Santa! Our adult brains think it, and wouldn't dare say it out loud. Neal... well, he says it, and not only does he say it, but he says it at a volume that anyone in a three block radius could hear it (I wonder where he got that).

For the most part this skill is a good thing, if we said everything we thought it would likely create a whole lot of problems, but this important skill has also taught us that we can construct an image we want people to see, and present it weather it's who we are or not. We have learned how to live our lives completely void of any real relationships.

I think that when God compares us to children in how we should approach Him, this is at least partly what He means. We can pretend with people, we cannot pretend with God. Maybe the more important truth is that we don't have to. People cannot handle every thought in our brain, but God can. What if we lived life simply sharing every thought, emotion, and idea with our God. What if we didn't filter with Him. We would be giving God our anger, fear, insecurity, joy, pain, hopes and dreams on a moment by moment basis. God has the ability to see and know our hearts, and it's this kind of intimacy that He longs to share with us. It is in this context that we allow God access to alter the state of our heart.