Deep Water

I've been wondering lately why the kingdom of God belongs to children. Why Jesus mentioned more than once that we should be like them. Accordingly, I've observed my children to see what they do that I would do well to emulate. G plays indiscriminately with children. He doesn't care if they're boy, girl, age 10, age 2, fat, short, purple, plague-ridden. He just sees a kid and immediately knows he has a playmate. Rhys, I noticed, gives grins and giggles with reckless abandon. He enthusiastically shows his happy face when one of his immediate family members picks him up, comes over to play with him, or shows him a bowl of rice cereal. So here's what I wonder about childlike faith: Is it about not just believing God but maybe also believing in each other? Like, maybe we should see more of our likenesses than our differences. After all, we are all formed from the same matter, all began with a man from dust and a woman formed from his rib. So should we spend less time sizing up each other's differences (sand in another's eye versus plank in our own) and more time reaching out to each other with the grace we are able to give because it's been given freely to us?

Jim's sermon today was related to this, in a way. He focused on Jesus telling fishermen to cast their net into the deep water and the surprising (to the fishermen) result they got. Jim reckoned that every once in a while, we are required to cast our nets into deep water. He likened this to unhappy life experiences, especially ones we didn't see coming: divorce, sickness, and the like. I wonder what "deep water" means if we apply it to ministry in our day to day lives. Might casting our net into deep waters mean giving a ride to the lady at the library who's just going up the street to the Salvation Army? Might deep waters be helping the overweight person sitting in a motorized shoppiing cart take his bags to his car instead of trying not to stare at him and wonder how he let himself get big enough to need an oxygen mask?

What I wonder is if maybe childlike faith and deep waters go hand in hand. Kids tend to see people, not guess at the situations they're in or how they got there. They tend to respond to an expressed need or desire with simple "yes" and "no" answers, rather than analyzing motivations and their own time schedules. Perhaps - once again it's taken me two paragraphs to get here - the Gospel message is simpler than we think. And if we could only get ourselves to think more simply, we'd see more of Jesus, not less.