What Are Children For?

To the ‘attention’ deficit grown-ups like us

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

“What are children for?”

It’s an odd sounding question, but one I’ve been thinking a lot about lately.

As a dad who has served in Children’s Ministry across various Christian denominations over the past fifteen years, I’ve noticed that Christians often answer this question differently with our minds than we do with our lives. Which is to say that how we treat children is often different than how we say we believe they should be treated.

That’s because our rational answer to such an unusual question is often different than how we live. Each of us is a divided being when it comes to answering just what children are for. On the one hand, we likely know the correct, theological answer while on the other we have our lived experience which often reveals what we believe most fundamentally about children (or about what is most important us). We know that children are a heritage from the Lord, that they are a gift and a blessing, and that they are precious to God¹ and yet, we might pause a moment when really considering what their purpose in the world (or the church) is: they don’t increase productivity, they can’t for many years contribute quantifiable returns on investment, and in the Church it’s often thought that they’re not old enough to teach or serve or give back financially in any meaningful way.

Children are: expensive, exhausting and often along for a free meal, like a roommate who never pays rent or does their own laundry. Kids are physically small and intrinsically vulnerable and novices in the human experience. They’re frequently misunderstood, misbehaving or simply misfits in the world of big, important adults.

So what are children are for? Are they empty vessels to be filled with knowledge and experience? Are they humans-in-training? Are they to be merely tolerated—seen but not heard—until some point in the distant future? Do they exist for our gratification? Or is their existence merely owed to the cold, hard rationalism which flatly concedes that without them we would eventually cease to exist as a species?

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This past December, at my church’s Christmas Pageant, as I watched the children of our church (including some of my own, sprinkled throughout the nativity scene) my heart was prompted to ask God that we might see our children in ways that are less about what works best (pragmatism) or what makes us the most comfortable (utilitarianism), and instead open ourselves up to what God has made children for:
to love and be loved
to care and be cared for
to share in the Kingdom with
to teach us adults about the smallness and the vastness of that Kingdom
to laugh and play
to look at the world in wonder
to be icons of Christ to the world
to be messy and loud and fast and slow and an example of God’s cheerful heart and his playfulness and his endless measure of love and passion.²

I heard it said this week that the only real currency we humans have anymore is the attention we give. How often have my children walked away from me with my face behind a phone screen? What we give our attention to these days communicates what we love and value. The kind of attentiveness to children which I’m advocating for—the willingness to see and nurture, wait and wonder—calls to mind a children’s book I love: “The Woman and the Wheat” and it is a magically simple book which follows a farmer as she works to grow the wheat and bake the bread that she will offer back to her Creator in Eucharistic celebration. Through the lyrical prose and beautiful imagery the reader is able to walk the fields with the Woman and join her in her work of sowing and waiting, collaborating (with God and neighbor!) and reaping, kneading and baking from seed-hope to Eucharist:

There once was a woman who planted some wheat.

She worked in the heat of a late summer day,

wiping her brow as she sowed the seeds.

And on her lips were prayers of all sorts: for the

rain, and the sun, and the moon, and the wheat—

and the bread that was to come.

That’s something of a metaphor for a lot of our lived experiences: small beginnings, shared responsibility, and time and energy spent investing in something of value which ultimately depends on God.

So it is with life among children.

The spiritual formation and befriending of children involves the kind of hidden, slow work of sowing attention and wonder. Cultivating Christ’s likeness among children is an endeavor that requires patient endurance. Yet, unlike vocational farming, it is something that every follower of Jesus is both called to and equipped for, as spiritual mothers, fathers, brothers and sisters. But it must start with attention and, as Wendell Berry says, “it all turns upon affection.”

“Invest in the millennium.
Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.”

–Wendell Berry

1. Psalm 127, Genesis 33, and Matthew 19 to name only a few.

2. Much more could be said, couldn’t it?