Jesus the Toddler

This is not going to be about what Jesus was like as an actual toddler (although it’d be fun to imagine what a prayer to Jesus-as-toddler might be, a la Ricky Bobby’s prayer to Jesus-as-baby, “Dear Eight Pound, Six Ounce, Newborn Baby Jesus, in your golden, fleece diapers, with your curled-up, fat, balled-up little fists pawin’ at the air.”)

Instead, this is about flipping the usual parenting analogy. Most spiritual analogies that involve parenting have God as the Heavenly Parent and us as the unruly, slightly stupid, and really stubborn children. Here, we’re the parent and Jesus is the toddler.

Let me set it up.

I was reading Isaiah last week (in my 3-year-long journey to read the Bible from beginning to end, yes, I’m only up to Isaiah) and came across this from 59:9,10,12:

So there is no justice among us,
we know nothing about right living.
We look for light but find only darkness.
We look for bright skies but walk in gloom.
We grope like the blind along a wall,
feeling our way like people without eyes….
For our sins are piled up before God
and testify against us.

And the image of our sins piled up before God struck me. I imagined a tower of blocks — childhood toy blocks. Probably because those are the kinds of tall piles I’ve made, over and over, while playing with children, both mine and others’.

I stack the blocks and the kid knocks them down — gleefully. And cries, “Again!” I race to build as much of the tower as I can before the kid knocks it down. And then we do it all over again, and again, and again. The kid has endless energy for knocking that tower down.

Isn’t this like Jesus? We’ve got this tower of sins that blocks us from God and JesusĀ knocks it down. That’s what Christians celebrate at Easter.

I have a vivid mental image of a particular little boy I had in children’s worship last year who’d let me build a tower of blocks as tall as him before he’d bust it down with the most delicious belly laugh and victorious jumping up and down. I like this image for Jesus scattering my tower of sins because it punctures my angst and navel-gazing with a KAPOW!

But I’m not done.

Here’s where the analogy stretches a little, because it isn’t Jesus begging us to build up the tower of our sins again, it’s us. We take the things we’ve already been forgiven of, things that are laying scattered on the floor, and stack them back up. We cannot give them up.

I guess I’m assuming things about you, but I can tell you with full confidence that there’s a lot I have a hard time giving up.

  • Any stupid or unkind thing I’ve said.
  • Confidences I failed to keep.
  • Plans to help someone that I never acted on.
  • Disciplines I haven’t been able to keep up.
  • An unwise decision I made in college that I asked forgiveness for several times because I kept forgetting whether I’d done it.
  • Excessive use of sarcasm with my children.
  • Irritability with my family.
  • Anger and bitterness that I can leave on the floor for months before letting them sneak back up into a wall.
  • Crippling disappointment — I say “crippling” because there’s plenty of fleeting disappointment, but I’m talking about that Job-level of complaint, “I’ve done so many things right. Why isn’t X going like I want it to?” Which is really this in disguise: “I’d run my life so much better than you, God!”
  • The need to both be right and be acknowledged as right. About way too many things.
I ask to be forgiven and Jesus knocks down my tower, KAPOW. Then, while we’re laughing and gleeful, I scoop a few blocks back and stack them. Jesus knocks them down with a karate kick this time. I try to hide the tower, to prevent him from knocking it down, so I build it behind me. But he finds it and body slams it. Even while I’m smiling at some of those blocks that flew all the way across the room, out of my reach (for now), my fingers scrabble for other blocks and…. You get the picture.
In real life, I, the adult, get tired of this game long before the toddler does. Loooong before. Similarly, Jesus does not tire of knocking down my tower of sins. He’ll do it every time I ask.
What kind of difference might it make to pray, “Jesus, I’m tired, so tired of building up this particular tower. Help me keep that block on the floor”?
My prayers are getting simpler as I get older. And I tend not to dictate as much to God exactly how things should look or go, at least as far as my spiritual life goes. Because I don’t want to limit God’s creativity. Maybe, if I notice the tower I keep rebuilding and admit my exhaustion and ask for help, instead of just knocking it down, Jesus will shrink those blocks, a little more every time I ask, until they’re so small that I go to rebuild it and can’t find them. There may be new blocks, but at least Jesus will have taken care of those old ones.
What’s in your tower? Are you as tired as I am of rebuilding with the same $%*^ blocks, over and over again?

 

Wonderful: Saul’s Fortress

One of the best things about writing this novelization of the story of David and Saul is the research.

The world was very different 3,000 years ago (duh). To try to accurately portray what life was like, physically as well as culturally, I’ve gotten to do a lot of reading, a lot of Googling various obscure issues, like where is the nearest spring to Bethlehem, how far could a person walk in a day, what was Philistine armor like. I’ve even managed to use the Calvin College library without incurring any late fees (unlike when I was a student there).

There isn’t a ton of archeological information for that location and time period (approx. 1,000 BCE), so I get to make stuff up. But I’m always alert to new snippets of data.

Here’s how Saul’s fortress changed over the various drafts of the novel.

Early in my research, I found an online photo of a ruin said to be Saul’s fortress. The author said it was probably plain, nothing fancy or very large — not at all like the medieval castle we might imagine. All commentators agree that Saul, as Israel’s first king, was more like the top tribal chief than what we think of as a king. So my first imaginings of the fortress had it as one large building, a first floor and a second floor. First floor for public functions, including his receiving room/throne room, and second floor for private.

But then I readĀ The Great Armies of Antiquity, by Richard A Gabriel. It described a building with casemate walls (inner and outer wall with stone filler in between) and a tower on each corner. So the fortress got a little larger and gained fortifications. In my imagination, the towers weren’t just tall, but they had low walls and crenellations on top so archers could fire at the enemy and then take cover. This is not in either the biblical or archeological record for that location, although there were fortresses at the time that had them.

I also imagined the fortress as being built up over time, my thinking being that the job evolved over the 40 or so years of his reign. When Saul first became king, he had the plain broad house, larger than a regular person’s house, but not out of the ordinary for a wealthy person. Then, as time went on, and the Philistines were a continuing threat, coming to within ten miles of Gibeah, Saul would’ve had the place built up. So I imagined a compound in a U shape: original house, a connecting long hall in the back to a new building the same size as the original. The king kept the throne room and private family quarters in the original house, used the hall for storage of taxes and tributes, and put servants next to the food storage on the first floor of the new building, armor bearers and some soldiers on the second floor. The cooking courtyard leads off this secondary building. A wall built at the front of these two structures contains a gate, much like a city gate, so visitors go through the gate, and through the interior courtyard before getting to Saul’s receiving room.

But then, today, while Googling water supplies near Gibeah, I found a link to a book that claims that there is only sufficient archeological evidence to support the existence of a single tower during the time period I need. Which I find more interesting. So now the fortress is the same as above except for one lone tower at the rear corner of the newer building (so the soldiers can get up there quickly and easily) that rises way above the city walls. There are stairs that lead around it on the inside, but once you get above the second floor, there are stones that jut out like ladder rungs, and the lookouts have to climb up the rest of the way.

Yes, I find this fun. But it also serves a purpose: to provide the reader with a richly detailed, plausible world. Soon, it’ll be in the hands of my beta readers and I’ll find out whether I succeeded. (Fingers crossed.)