When Children Ask Tough Questions

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When Children Ask Tough Questions

reflections by Troy Cady

A friend posed a question some days ago about helping children process the problem of suffering. Two questions related to this include:

1. “If God is good, loving and all-powerful, why is there still so much suffering and pain in the world?”, and

2. “Why doesn’t God answer my prayers?”

I offered my friend a preliminary response, but then realized I didn’t speak to her specific question—which was whether anyone knew of any books that could help children process these questions. So, I am circling back now and adding these thoughts. I decided to share them here in case they may be of benefit to anyone else.  

Grace and peace,

Troy

………………………

            Dear friend,

            I am so grateful to you for starting this dialogue. I realized later that I didn’t actually address the question you were asking, which has to do with books that engage this concern. Sorry about that!

            In my opinion, the Godly Play story-method does the best job at providing space for this conversation with children. As you already mentioned, however: the big drawback to that approach is that many people do not have access to Godly Play.

            With that in mind, a few books come to mind that could perhaps equip families in this. Forgive me ahead of time if you are looking for children’s books. I haven’t been able to think of any, but maybe this list will be a help. That said, there are books adults could read that would be a help in nurturing a variety of relational skills that I find crucial in having conversations like these with children.

A book on practicing the Examen

The first resource I recommend is a short book called Sleeping With Bread: Holding What Gives You Life by Dennis Linn, Sheila Fabricant Linn and Matthew Linn. This book does not directly address the kinds of questions you are talking about but it commends to us a lifestyle of paying attention to both consolation and desolation in the human experience. When this kind of “paying attention” to both the dark and light becomes a habit, it can help us see the grace that is there even in suffering, pain and unanswered prayer (which are forms of “desolation”).

            Of course, you already know about this under the name of the Examen; I recommend this book, however, because of its accessibility and simple depth. Even children can practice it and this book describes the Examen in such a way that parents could easily find a way to practice it with their children.

            Practicing the Examen in community can help children process the problem of suffering in that the Examen process itself simply opens up space for conversations to be had without forcing any artificial responses. It also provides a language for talking about the mystery of life as a continuous mixture of light and darkness. It is a function of faith to search for language to describe what we are thinking and feeling, so this practice does that really well.

Two more books on childhood spiritual development

The second book I have enjoyed is The Mystery of the Child by Martin E. Marty, but it is somewhat academic and not all the chapters are helpful. The reason I like this book is that Marty does a good job of articulating the “problem-centered” approach to formation vis-á-vis the “mystery-centered” approach.

            I suggest that most discipleship materials we have been exposed to over the years take a “problem-centered” approach to formation. This approach has oriented us to an “assurance” model, where the primary concern is to be sure that there are certain (“right”) answers to specific questions. Of course, it is good to lay foundations, to reinforce truths which are unchanging and rock solid. Children need such a foundation, if trust is to be established. However…

            The problem with the assurance model is that it can only take us so far in our spiritual development. On this front, I encourage others to become familiar with James Fowler’s work Stages of Faith, as he describes that ultimately what we are aiming for in spiritual growth is a more reflective approach that views paradox as a pathway to becoming a more compassionate and empathetic person in adulthood.

            According to Fowler, one does not reach such a “reflective” approach to faith until adulthood but, in my own work with children, I have seen first-hand that they are able to enter into the realm of “mystery” even more fully than adults.

The mystery-centered approach to formation

Indeed, the word “mystery” is what Marty proposes as the basic building block when it comes to childhood spiritual development. He notes that with a problem-centered approach, we tend to employ strategies of “control.” With a mystery-centered approach, however, the primary mode is to explore, wonder, and practice curiosity. The process of formation can meander and the goal is not so much to train someone to produce a certain, specific answer but to form in us a practice of wondering that will better help us live into any number of mysteries as we age, the issue-at-hand included.

            Marty advocates a mystery-centered approach because he notices that when we treat spiritual formation in a problem-centered way it is not long before we start treating the child herself as a problem that needs to be solved. In a problem-centered approach, not only do we feel the need to control the answers, we also become inclined to control the one who is seeking answers. I have unfortunately seen first-hand how both children and adults can be marginalized by the problem-centered approach when their thinking does not conform to the “correct” way a leader thinks everyone should think. In the problem-centered paradigm, belonging is predicated on thinking the right way and producing the right answers. Those who think and say the right things are included and those who do not…end up feeling excluded, unaccepted.

            But people are not problems to be controlled; we are—all of us, at any age—mysteries to be loved. This will sound like heresy to many but I advocate an approach to childhood formation that is less concerned with providing right answers and more concerned with practicing healthy process.

A good book on healthy process

To those of us who are inclined towards a problem-centered approach, letting go of our need for right answers and letting go of our desire for everyone else to share those right answers is perhaps the hardest thing we will ever have to do in this life. That is also why I advocate that, to make space for children to wonder about these mysteries, we primarily need to help the adults in the child’s life prioritize process over content.

            I recommend Edwin Friedman’s insights on “family process” in this regard. His book Generation to Generation addresses this issue well. He observes that if we are to do only one thing to navigate such anxiety-laden issues, we would do well to simply cultivate a non-anxious environment through leaders who embody a non-anxious presence.

Ministry in the home as non-anxious presence

This is the secret, by the way, to the Godly Play process. Godly Play’s value lies not so much in the specific content of the stories that are told. It has more to do with cultivating a peaceful, non-anxious space where children (and adults!) can fully wonder about the mystery of faith. To cultivate this, there are all kinds of non-verbal, environmental factors at play which we could incorporate into the home. Here are a few:

            1. “Make a circle in which we are surrounded by the story of God and God’s people.” The circle structure itself levels the relational playing field (putting everyone at ease) and the surrounding stories encourage a feeling of security, as if we are being held safe within a story that is so much bigger than we are.

            In this regard, I suggest turning to stories in the Bible itself. There is ample opportunity to wonder about the problem of suffering that way. Parents could either use a Bible with pictures in it or they could look up art online that they could use to accompany their reading. In any case, getting beyond just a propositional understanding of the matter and encountering it via a story is crucial.   

            I say this because the story mode itself helps us get beyond a problem-centered approach and automatically places us in the realm of mystery. We do find answers to our questions, to be sure, but the answers come to us in context and they are of a different order than problem-centered answers. We discover propositions that are rooted in life—propositions that offer incarnational interpretations (suited to one’s specific sitz im leben).

            Keeping in mind that most people do not have access to the specific Godly Play experience, I suggest families can still access the “circle-principle” at home. “I wonder how each family would do that?” one could ask. Just that wondering question alone could help families cultivate this ethos in ways that are suited to their unique situation. That said, here is another practice to encourage healthy process:  

            2. Practice plenty of silence. When I am working with children, we always have a moment of silence before engaging the story-at-hand. And, as we tell the story, we pause so there is time to enter into the story by having space to reflect.

            I wonder what difference it would make to help children practice a bit of silence when questions like these come up? I wonder how we would do that?

            Silence is able to help us listen more deeply, so it can not only help us listen to the child better but it can also help the child listen for what God might say (or ask!) in response to their question. I wonder what would happen if we replied to a child’s question about suffering this way: “Good question! I wonder what God might say or ask about that?” or “I wonder if God has a story about that?” Then, just leave a little bit of silence for the child to think about it.

            The child might not be able to come up with an answer, but that is okay, too. The question itself would plant the idea in their head that God might have something to say about their question. Children who have no idea how to answer such a question may simply put the question aside for a while and then circle back to it later when it comes up again. Silence, listening and patience go hand-in-hand. With that, here’s another value to practice:  

            3. Respond by wondering. When I work with children, I always encourage them to wonder. Wondering questions are open-ended questions where children do not have to feel anxious or compelled to provide the right answer. It is evident to me how some children have been so trained in the problem-centered approach that, when it comes to wondering, I can see them looking at me as if they want to make sure they can really say what they think or feel. This is why non-anxious leadership is so crucial. The leader’s primary goal is to be a non-anxious presence in order to cultivate a non-anxious environment. The main concern is process over content, milieu over “learning objective.”

            To cultivate an environment of wondering, we need to trust that the child will learn what the child needs to learn when the child needs to learn it. True learning cannot be forced. Anyone who has ever crammed for a test can confirm this. It is one thing to learn the right answers to meet the demands of a specific moment in time; it is quite another to learn out of sheer desire. In the former, our learning is only temporary and causes no long-lasting effect. In the latter, learning is truly life-changing.

            This is why, when a child asks a question during a time of wondering, the leader is encouraged to wonder right with them, to put the question back to the child. The goal is to whet the appetite for more learning. By replying “I wonder what you think about that” or “Yes, I wonder how that could really be” the teacher will find out how ready the child is to really find an answer. If the child is really ready, they will be driven from within to keep seeking. If they are not really open to an answer (if the question is somehow only superficial for them at the present time) they will most likely drop the inquiry and move on to something that more truly interests them.

            In any case, if an answer is really needed, we can trust they will get an answer in a timely way and in such a form that suits the child’s place in their spiritual journey. Trust in the process is key.

Why adults get nervous by tough questions kids ask

My suspicion is that adults grow nervous when hard questions like these come up because many of us are operating ourselves under an “assurance” or “problem-centered” model. When we cannot produce neat, clean answers, it is very unsettling. We worry not only for the child, but we worry for ourselves.

            I also suspect that those who have spent lots of time and energy coming up with certain answers know deep down that our answers are not so air-tight as we pretend they are. There is an internal frustration that builds when the questions just keep coming, when the questions keep poking holes in our so-called answers.

            There are, of course, many different ways we try to cope with such a frustration, but the most tragic outcome is when our own frustration hurts the child’s own learning. If we are to minister to families well (children included), an argument could be made that the first order of business is to help the adults in the household make peace with uncertainty and to model a non-anxious (trusting) response to hard questions.

The deeper question behind the question of suffering

This leads me to a final observation. There is a question behind the question, underneath the problem of suffering. The question hits right to the core of our being because ultimately what we are asking is whether the world is a safe place to live. Are we safe and secure? Is there someone who will be able to take care of us when all human efforts have reached a limit?

            It is really the pre-verbal question we all have from the moment of birth. In gestation, we experience the world as a place of complete safety, where we are both secure and nourished. While it is true we may be aware of chaos without, we all experience the womb as a place of shalom within—where all that we need is provided and there is no thought spared for worry.

            But when we are born, it is only a matter of time when we will experience the world as shocking and dangerous. We are vulnerable, so our bodies automatically muster whatever is available to survive. From our very first day of life we intuitively know that we are in need of protection. We are not able to survive on our own.

            When we become aware of how dangerous life can be as we age, we are essentially drawing on these primordial fears from infancy. “Is the world a safe place?” And we begin to develop the capacity to extrapolate from our own experience, becoming aware that—even when we feel personally safe—there are countless others who, at any moment in time in any number of other places, are experiencing the world as an unsafe place.

            “Where is God in the midst of all this?” we wonder. If God is supposed to be a parent to us, why has s/he left us abandoned, exposed like this? Does s/he care more about some people than others? If so, none of us are safe. We are all vulnerable.

Why the parent-child interaction matters

In keeping with the reality noted above, we can see that the parent-child relationship shapes our concept of God more than any other relationship. This dynamic is so fundamental to human experience we can observe it embedded even in the ancient code by which the Hebrew people lived thousands of years ago (and still live by today). It is no mistake that the fifth “Word” of the Decalogue (the Ten Commandments) speaks to one’s relationship to one’s parents.

            We know from Scripture that the ten Words were written on two tablets and many scholars see the two tablets in terms of one’s relationship with God (the first tablet) and one’s relationship to other humans (the second tablet). At first glance, it appears the fifth Commandment (about the parent-child relationship) would be included with the second tablet, but many scholars assert it is a first-tablet command because when we are children our parent is a godlike figure to us. I find it interesting that modern psychology confirms this, as well: our concept of God is directly related to our parental relationship.

            I mention this by way of underscoring that I believe the biggest way we can help children grapple with the problem of suffering is by helping parents be a “good god” to them by the way we carry out our mandate to love them and nurture them with care. This is why it was wise of you to include the matter of “unanswered prayer” along with the problem of suffering in your original inquiry. Both issues have to do with one’s sense of safety and security. “Is there a God who listens and answers?” To the child: if a parent doesn’t know how to listen and respond, then why would God?  Listening and responding in a spirit of wonder for these sacred mysteries will do more to “answer” the child’s question than anything else.

Why we need God and why good parenting isn’t enough

This, of course, does not mean bad things won’t happen. There is no way that we as limited human beings can keep bad things from happening. But this is why we need God. Because, even when bad things happen, we believe there is One who is able to hold us as we are born into another world…One who will receive us in love to a world where there will be no more danger, or suffering or pain or death. Somehow, we learn through all this that, though this world is a dangerous place, we can still trust—and trust gives us enough hope to carry on. Trust is not predicated on the absence of danger; in some strange way, it is defined by it.

            How the God of the world to come indwells, surrounds and gives us hope for living in the present dangerous world is the very mystery we are living one day at a time. It is a mystery so big, we can never run out of wonder for it.

            I realize that much of this does not directly answer your question, but I share it nonetheless because, quite frankly, I don’t know how to directly answer your question. But I can wonder about it and encourage others to wonder about it, too. Thanks again for raising the question.

Peace and grace to you,

Troy

Delighting in God

Delighting in God

by Troy Cady

Moments of joy are the bookmarks of the soul. Like folds on the corners of the pages of your life, moments of joy are wrinkles that point you to something good. Turn to a joyful page mentally and you could swear you were there again physically. Despite some hard things I’ve experienced over the years, I am grateful that if you were to pick up the unfinished story of my life, you would see many, many page corners turned over—reminders that life has truly been filled with joys too many to count, unforgettable moments of delight, grace and wonder.

I think of childhood winters in Minnesota, playing hockey on an outdoor rink with friends from the neighborhood. In my memory, I can smell the wood burning in the stove-fire from the warming house, I can feel the heat and hear the laughter after my oldest brother told one of his many jokes.

I wonder: as you reflect on your own story…what pages are earmarked—what special moments of pure joy would we encounter there? I invite you now to enjoy a bit of silence as you turn in your mind’s eye to one of these pages.

I am convinced we can never have enough of such goodness. So, in this essay I invite us to look more deeply at the theme of delight. In another essay, I considered an aspect of delight that we don’t often think about: it’s the reality that God delights. Zephaniah 3:17 says that God delights in us and sings over us. Quite simply, I put it this way: God is not a killjoy; he loves us so much he actually likes us, enjoys us.

I write this in hopes that we will get caught up in God’s goodness to the point where we can reflect God’s delight and wonder in our own lives. To that end, in this teaching I want to explore 1) why delight matters, 2) what it is and 3) a few ways we are invited to live in delight.  

Why delight matters

First, why does this topic matter? To be honest, talking about living a delightful life seems like a luxury to us. I mean…who has time to talk about enjoying life when there’s so much work to be done, wrongs to be righted, and improvements to be made? Ultimately, this is why this topic matters. As a society, we are constantly driven to accomplish more and we feel guilt or shame if we don’t.  Sadly, this is an indicator to me that we tend to take ourselves too seriously.

To be sure, this mindset of crippling seriousness easily infects us. We live in a world where bad news dominates the daily media cycle and Facebook turns others into faceless abstractions such that we would do better to call it Hatebook. It’s easy to take ourselves too seriously when we are overwhelmed by negativity, fear and anger. This causes us to suffer from what author Christine Aroney-Sine describes as “play deprivation, nature deficit disorder, awe depletion, compassion fatigue, imagination suppression, and more.”[1] And, if it is true that God is, in his very essence, filled with delight, joy, and creativity, then it is also true that, as Aroney-Sine asserts, “…we suffer from God deprivation too.”[2]

Our need for delight is not a new concept. In the thirteenth century, Thomas Aquinas asserted that delight matters because it is essential for happiness—and happiness, he says, is “the last end [or goal] of human life.”[3]

In commenting on this, Peter Kreeft, a philosopher at Boston College, says that happiness is the ultimate goal in life “because all seek it as an end [in itself], not as a means to any further end...No one seeks happiness,” he says, “in order to be rich, or powerful, or wise, but people seek riches, or power, or wisdom because they think these will make them happy...”[4]

That’s why Aquinas devotes four large sections of his magnum opus, the Summa Theologica, to the matter of happiness. In one article, he provides four reasons as to why he thinks delight is essential for happiness.[5] 1) Delight, he says, is “a preamble and preparation” for happiness. Just as one needs instruction if one is to understand science, so delight is a teacher who prepares us for the eternal art of happiness. 2) Delight, he says, perfects happiness. It is like the soul of the body. If happiness is the objective state of total well-being, delight is the subjective experience of it. Delight perfects happiness because, through delight, we know first-hand that we are happy. 3) Delight, he says, is a helper to happiness, like a friend helping another friend achieve what could not be done alone. When we feel lost and lonely, delight is a wise companion showing us the way to happiness. And, 4) Aquinas observes that delight is essential for happiness because it is “attendant” to happiness, like heat is attendant to fire.

The nature of delight

Aquinas’ fourth observation does more than tell us why delight is important; it also tells us about the nature of delight. The mystery of being human is that no person you ever meet is only a mind, or emotion or a body. To be fully human (and gladly so) is to integrate mind, emotion and body—just as it is in the nature of a flame to always integrate heat, light and the substance (or body) of fire. To blaze with life, humans integrate (as Peter Kreeft puts it) “the light of the fire of life” and “the heat of the fire of life”[6]—while the fire itself is given tangible expression through our bodies.

Delight integrates these life-fire qualities of light, heat and substance. We experience it often as warmed affections or quickened emotions, but we also experience it when our intellect has been enlightened and we learn something new. What’s more, our mind and heart converge in delight such that we can actually sense it physically in our bodies—and sometimes this works the other way around, too. Our body has the capacity to tell us when our mind relishes an exciting new discovery or when our feelings are telling us we are falling in love. The taste of sweet fruit, or the sound of ocean waves or the tenderness and passion of sex all testify to the way delight unifies body, mind and heart. Just as it is impossible to pick apart the light, heat and substance of a flame, so it is impossible to separate what makes us wonderfully and mysteriously human. 

Because of this, I find it helpful to think of delight as the soul of life itself. And the expression “Bless the Lord, O my soul” (Ps. 103:1) illustrates this vividly. We often relate this expression to “the spiritual life,” imagining the words “bless” and “soul” as invisible realities. But the expression “bless the Lord, O my soul” points us to the body from first to last because the word “bless” here is the Hebrew word “baruch” or “barak”, meaning “to kneel.” And the word “soul” is “nephesh”—which means “neck.”[7] Significantly, the neck is the crossroads where blood, oxygen and the electrical signals of the nervous system pass through to integrate the mind, heart, lungs, and extremities in one glorious living, breathing, pulsing, walking, and reaching wonder.

Thus, “Bless the Lord, O my soul” could be rendered expansively as: “Bend the knee to the Lord, O my everything. Neck, do your work. Let my mind be rapt in wonder, let my heart (my emotion) be amazed and enjoy how good God is…and let my body show it: let me laugh and sing, shout, cry, run, rest and rise. Let worship sink deep into my bones; drive me to my knees because God is awesome and wonderful and beyond understanding. Make me a put-together person.”

The expression denotes wholeness, which the Bible describes as “shalom”—total well-being. It’s a vision of human flourishing and, indeed, the flourishing of all living things. In Psalm 72, we get a vivid picture of this “blessed” life of shalom. The Psalm was written by King Solomon during a time of peace and prosperity. Food was never lacking and the nation’s intellectual endeavors gained international recognition. It was a golden age. Though this psalm serves as a picture of Israel during the time of Solomon, it can also be taken as a description of what happens when people and the world are whole (or put-together) by delighting in God.

The Psalm says a world of shalom is a world where justice is done, the oppressed are defended, and children are fed. It says we are rescued from violence and the land is fruitful. As the psalmist finishes painting this picture for us, he observes in verse seventeen: “Then all nations will be blessed through him [the king], and they will call him blessed.”

Our picture of the happy life is enriched here because the word blessed appears in two different forms: “barak” and “asher.” Both can be translated as “blessed” but the former means “to kneel” while the latter connotes “gladness and happiness,” or “to make glad” or “to be happy.”

The first instance this word appears in the Bible is when Jacob’s wife Leah has a child and names him Asher. Upon his birth, she exclaims how happy she is and that others will call her happy, too, so she is going to call the child “Happy” or “Asher.” In Leah’s story, happiness is both an objective state of being and a subjective experience, both a noun and a verb.

That is the picture we get in Psalm 72 and it’s actually an image of a king kneeling to serve, such that the nations are blessed and the king is “happy” because the nations are blessed.

Princeton scholar Ellen Charry refers to this all-encompassing vision of shalom as asherism. It sounds like a strange concept, but Charry sums it up simply: “God enjoys our happiness and we enjoy God’s happiness.”[8] Asherism holds forth the hope that one day we will experience happiness not as a momentary experience but as a permanent, lasting reality—as it is in God’s very self. It affirms that God made all things out of God’s own deep gladness and joy—and God made humans in God’s image to reflect and experience that same gladness and joy. God wants all that is in God’s being and all that proceeds from God’s being to return to God, to flow in and out continuously in eternal gladness, like an endless ocean of deep, enduring happiness.

Ways to practice delight

In her book God and the Art of Happiness Ellen Charry includes several practical outcomes of asherism and I will mention two before considering other ways to practice delight as a means to happiness.

First, Charry asserts that to grow “in the art of happiness” it’s good to steward our talents and strengths well.[9] God, in utter gladness, has made each of us unique and it delights God when we notice, appreciate and live in step with the special abilities he has given us. Charry encourages us to be “unashamed” of our gifts, so if someone shares with you how you have blessed them, you can just say thank you to them and to God for making you the way he did. Just delight!

A second way Charry encourages us to practice delight is to enjoy creation by stewarding it well.[10] For those who are especially dedicated to creation care, it is good to remember to just enjoy creation along the way and to let yourself be amazed by nature’s ability to heal itself. In our work to save the planet we can sometimes feel overwhelmed. In those instances, you might like to try imagining God right by our side, smiling, sweaty and singing as he tends the fields and forests, rivers and lakes. He notices the butterflies and bees before we do, so it’s good to let God’s own sustenance of creation delight us deeply.

In any case, whether we are stewarding our gifts or stewarding creation, both types of stewardship are rooted in a key aspect of delight—which is noticing what God notices by bringing all your senses, your full self, to your waking hours. I think of the delight of cooking and relishing the taste of food that has been lovingly prepared. Just the act of slowing down to savor a meal can do wonders to strengthen your posture towards delight. I think of the wonder of music, the sounds of the wind, crickets and birds; we have endless opportunities to delight in God with our ears. I think of the many delights we can enjoy as we slow down to notice the scent of a recent rainfall or a plot of flowers, the smell of a puppy or fresh-ground coffee. Our eyes can delight as we slowly take in a painting of thick oil textures, a black-and-white photograph, or the veins and colors of a maple leaf. Gazing at the clouds, looking at the waves, or taking in the sunset can fill us with awe and wonder. Feeling the sand beneath your feet, gently touching a baby’s cheek, or just enjoying the feeling of water flowing freely through your hands can be great ways to delight in God. There is no contradiction between a godly life and a sensual life.

A key aspect of delight simply involves slowing down enough to be fully present. The older I get the more I am convinced this is the hardest thing for us to do. In a culture that values the self-made individual, there is little that makes us feel stranger than the experience of doing nothing. As soon as we have nothing to do, we fill it with something else to do.

In his book Theology of Play, Jürgen Moltmann observes how severely our desire for productivity impinges on our quest for happiness. He notes that, for most people, even vacation has become a phenomenon that must be put to useful ends.[11] Sadly, we often place unhelpful expectations on our rest, measuring it by how effective or fun or productive it was. Somehow, vacation itself even becomes work. Is it any wonder that, irony of ironies, the leisure sector is considered an industry? When rest becomes a market, something is seriously wrong. 

The Bible commends to us the practice of Sabbath to help us detox from our addiction to doing and productivity. In Hebrew it is the word “shabbat” and it literally means “stop, rest.”[12] The first instance of the word in Scripture is used in reference to God. It comes right after Genesis 1 where we have a picture of God creating the entire world out of sheer delight. Along the way, the story tells us that God noticed what he had made and blessed it. But then day 7 arrives and the text surprises us. Instead of continuing to make more wonderful things, God stops (“sabbaths”) and rests, truly rests. He just does nothing and he just enjoys being with what he has made.

Lest we think this anticlimactic, the writer gives us a clue as to why this “work of rest” is the pinnacle of all God’s works. The writer says that God not only “blessed” the seventh day, but it says he “got married to it.” Most translations render the Hebrew as “called it holy” but the Jewish scholar Abraham Joshua Heschel points out that the phrase “sanctified it” or “called it holy” connotes images of “betrothal” and “marriage.”[13] In other words, God loved this seventh day of rest so much that he said, “I want to marry you; I will cleave to your side forever and love you passionately.”

This is why the rabbinic community has historically referred to the seventh day as Queen Sabbath, because on the seventh day God, the King, took to himself a Queen—the nobility, the dignity, delight and wonder…of rest.

A teacher I had recently told a story about an experience he had with his grandson that illustrates how wonderful pure, simple rest can be. He was visiting his family in Central America and they were at a small, local grocery store. His grandson, who was about three, said: “Grandpa! Come here!” The boy led his grandpa to the back of the store where there was a pastry counter. He wanted the largest chocolate donut you have ever seen, so…Grandpa bought it. By the time they left the store, the boy’s face and shirt front were covered in chocolate frosting but he still had a lot of donut to eat. As they walked towards home, the boy kept eating his donut but they had to be careful because the sidewalk was very narrow and there were cars whizzing by on a narrow street to their left with a high wall towering up on their right. At a certain point, the wall lowered, so the boy could sit down on it just to keep enjoying his donut. Grandpa noticed the boy had stopped, so he turned back to catch him up. And as he approached his grandson, the little boy just gave his Grandpa a look—and motioned (without a word) for him to sit down. And there they sat silently, just doing nothing, just enjoying being with each other, delighting in the moment. As the boy’s grandpa told that story to us, he explained: “That’s why I think of God as a three-year-old boy.”

Conclusion

I think the grandfather in that story is onto something: God really could be a child, inviting us to be a child, too. I love how Ann Lamott puts it in her book Bird by Bird: “Try walking around with a child who’s going, ‘Wow, wow! Look at that dirty dog! Look at that burned-down house! Look at that red sky!’ And the child points and you look and you see, and you start going, ‘Wow! Look at that huge crazy hedge! Look at that teeny tiny little baby! Look at the scary dark cloud!’ I think this is how we are supposed to be in the world—present and in awe.”

Is it any wonder Jesus said that we must “change and become like little children” if we are to live in God’s kingdom? (Mt. 18:3) To delight in God is just to play like God plays, to enjoy God and the world God has made, to rest, to stop long enough to notice, to take ourselves lightly, to just be fully present to others, to honor moments of silent wonder, to get your body into it…kneeling, savoring, listening, embracing, and singing. Play puts us together, within and without. In play and delight we lay down our compulsion to control and consume; we lay down our own agenda…and just rest. Since we cannot achieve the end of happiness without delight, let us practice it with all our heart, soul, mind and strength.

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[1] from The Gift of Wonder (Downers Grove: Intervarsity Press, 2019), 4.

[2] Ibid., 4.

[3] Thomas Aquinas. Summa of the Summa (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1990), 349.

[4] Peter Kreeft. Summa of the Summa (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1990), 350.

[5] Thomas Aquinas. Summa of the Summa (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1990), 382.

[6] Peter Kreeft. Heaven: The Heart’s Deepest Longing (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1989), 125.

[7] Eugene Peterson. Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 2008), 36.

[8] Ellen Charry. God and the Art of Happiness (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 2010), 275.

[9] Ibid., 275-276.

[10] Ibid., 276.

[11] Jürgen Moltmann. Theology of Play, trans. Reinhard Ulrich (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), 8-9.

[12] Eugene Peterson. Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 2008), 109.

[13] Quoting a rabbi, Abraham Joshua Heschel writes “…sanctification is the Hebrew word for marriage.” And: “The Hebrew word le-kadesh, to sanctify, means…to consecrate a woman, to betroth.” See Heschel. The Sabbath (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), 55, 51-52.

a God who delights

Here's a talk I gave recently at Grace Covenant Church in Chicago. I hope it blesses you. You can read part 2 of this series on delighting in God here.  -Troy

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A God Who Delights

by Troy Cady

I invite you to think of someone you like a lot, the kind of person that lifts your spirit whenever you are around them. Try to think of just what it is you like about them and describe the qualities you admire with specific words or phrases. Maybe you’d like to take a moment to give thanks for the gift of that person in your life.

Now consider this: the way you think about that person is the way God thinks about you. God delights in you. In fact, God is full of delight for the whole world. That, quite simply, is all I want to look at in this essay.

God is not a killjoy

I don’t know about you but for the better part of my life I didn’t think of God as someone who is full of delight. At various times I have thought of God as a standard of perfection to which I could never measure up, a God who could only be pleased with me if I performed well for him and others. I’ve gone through seasons where it seemed I could never stop committing a certain sin and at different points I was sure I had reached the limit where God would say, “Okay, that’s it. I’m done with you. You’re hopeless.” I imagined that if I ever saw God face to face, he would want to know why it is that I can come up with lots of good ideas but never complete any of them. This God is the God of regret, a God defined by all my lost chances and failed tests. This is the killjoy God.

But this is not the kind of God the Bible describes. The God of the Bible is a God whose mercies are new every morning. This God never says, “I’m done with you.” This God says, “You’re mine and I love you so much. I made you: I will never stop loving you.” This God believes in you and sees good things in you, because this God is the one who put those good things in you. This God loves you so much that he actually likes you.

That might sound like a strange thing to say because we tend to think that loving someone is greater than liking them, but when we apply that notion to God we end up with the twisted thought that perhaps God has found a way to love us without actually liking us. We might quote the verse “God is love” but somewhere inside us there is a disconnect between the love of God and the delight of God. Yes, God loves us—but is it possible, could it be…that God delights in us so much he actually likes us?

The prospect of this is so wonderful that I encourage you to spend an entire month letting that simple truth sink into your heart, mind and body. Because God loves, God delights.

This truth is brought out beautifully by a key verse I encourage you to meditate on over and over again. It’s from Zephaniah 3:17 where it says,

“The Lord your God is with you,

the Mighty Warrior who saves.

He will take great delight in you;

in his love he will no longer rebuke you,

but will rejoice over you with singing.”

Just soak that in now. If there was ever a doubt that God delights in you, this verse lays that doubt to rest: “he will take great delight in you.”

In my study of that text, I looked at the word delight and discovered that there are several words in Hebrew that can be translated as delight. It’s as if God’s delight is like a diamond with many faces. Turning the diamond to see a different side brings out different colors, each one fascinating to behold.

In this verse, a certain variety of delight holds center stage. Notice that the verse is formed by five lines. Lines one and two provide a set-up for lines three through five and the latter three lines form their own triplet. In this case, some Hebrew scholars render the last three lines like so:

“he will rejoice over you with gladness;

he will quiet you with his love,

he will rejoice over you with singing.”

The phrase “he will take great delight in you” conveys the image of God “rejoicing over you with gladness.” I love that: God is joyful…filled with gladness.

The set-up to this establishes a situation of close, personal safety. It describes God as a Mighty One, someone who is strong enough to save you from trouble. This “mighty one” is named and located in the first phrase where it says: “Yahweh, your God, is in your midst.”

Yahweh is God’s name, not God’s title. The writer here is calling God by name and reminding us that Yahweh is very close to us (in our midst) keeping us safe. Within this place of intimate, personal safety, God freely rejoices over you with gladness (line 3) and with singing (line 5). Thus, line 4 makes it clear: when we experience that kind of love, that kind of delight, it quiets the uproar in our hearts.

How we need that kind of love today! This verse tells us quite simply that God is not a killjoy. He is up-close and personal. He is safe. He sings gladly over you. He quiets you, loves you, delights in you.

God is not an It

This verse also suggests to us another myth we need to lay to rest about God and it is this: God is not an It. This poem speaks of God in personal terms. You’ll notice that in this particular verse, the poetry would fall flat were it to speak of God in terms of an It: “it will take great delight in you, it will quiet you with its love, it will rejoice over you with singing.”  That kind of textual rendering would sound kind of creepy, actually!

In this instance, the verbs happen to be in the third person masculine singular which indicates the “he” pronoun: “he will take great delight in you, he will quiet you, he will rejoice over you.”

The emphasis, however, is not on the “he” but on the personal nature of God. God is not an It, but nor is God solely a “he.” Other texts dealing with the delight of God also bring out the feminine personal aspect of God, speaking of God in terms of “she” or “her.”

Look at Proverbs 8 for a great example of this. In this text, God is very closely identified with Wisdom who is portrayed as a woman. In fact, Wisdom is so closely associated with God in this text that many interpreters feel it is like God talking about God's self in the voice of a woman. In my study for this topic, I looked closely at this text because it tells us in verses 30 and 31 that Wisdom is “filled with delight.” In wanting to learn what kind of delight the text is describing, I discovered other ways of translating how God talks about Herself here. And I love this translation, which says:

"I was an artisan with God.

I was filled with delight day after day,

playing, laughing always in God's presence,

playing, laughing, enjoying the whole world,

delighting in all humanity."

One popular translation of the Hebrew text renders “playing, laughing” as “rejoicing” but really the idea of delight here is one of playing and laughing. Additionally, the phrase “I was constantly at his side” could be translated literally as “I was an artisan.” This text encourages us to think of God as a laughing, playful painter or sculptor who happens to be a woman—which is very different than how we normally think of God.

Another delightful feminine image of God draws a parallel between God and the city of God’s people, Jerusalem—the “City of Peace.” In Isaiah 66:12-13, God and this city of peace are closely identified when God says,

“I will extend peace to her like a river,

and the wealth of nations like a flooding stream;

you will nurse and be carried on her arm

and dandled on her knees.

As a mother comforts her child,

so will I comfort you;

 and you will be comforted over Jerusalem.”

Notice how the text surprises us here. In the first part, it sounds like God is describing Jerusalem as a mother but then in the last three lines the mother Jerusalem is equated with the motherhood of God.

Though this picture of a city of peace has a literal counterpart in the land of Israel, it also expresses a desire of God’s to see every city, including ours, to become a place of peace. Notice that, for that to happen, God plays the role of mother, nursing us, carrying us on her arm, playing with us like a mother playing with her toddler on her knees. It’s a picture of comfort, of being nourished by God’s delight, carried by her and enjoying her.

I just love the thought here that God delights in our city neighborhoods. When we think of the city we often think of all the problems that need to be fixed, but when God thinks of the city God doesn’t start with the problem, God starts with delight. And God’s delight is our very peace. And God’s delight is personal.

God is not Plato’s Unmoved Mover

Another myth we need to dispel about God is something we’ve inherited from a long tradition of European philosophy. It comes from Plato who described God as “the Unmoved Mover.” This God is distant and stoic, unmoved by our plight.

In Isaiah 38, we get another image of God’s delight in the story of Hezekiah who became so sick he was on the verge of death. He cried out to God and, when he recovered, Hezekiah wrote a song to thank God for answering his prayer. In verse 17 we get a beautiful picture of another side of God’s delight, where Hezekiah writes: “In your love you kept me from the pit of destruction…”

The imagery in Hebrew, however, is even more vivid than this. It is a picture of attachment where God actually gets into the pit with Hezekiah, who testifies: “You attached to me, and loved my soul out of the pit.” It’s a picture of a God who not only moves to restore life but who jumps right into the pit of hell to wrap his arms around us and love us back to life. In this text, God’s delight is God’s passionate, merciful attachment to us.

This image of a leaping, attaching, loving, delighting God makes up the very center of the core story I use in my work with children year after year. We start the story by saying that God dances so hard he leaps right out of himself back into himself. We say that God was so joyful, he leapt into our world in love. “And now,” we say, “God is inviting you to dance with him.”

Contrary to Plato’s Unmoved Mover, the God of the Bible is not static…the God of the Bible is ek-static, which means “out of oneself.” When you are in a state of ecstasy, you have the sensation that you are having an out-of-body experience. It’s transcendent.

The philosopher Peter Kreeft says that’s what joy is. It’s the state of leaping out of your own skin into another and back again. When we talk about “falling in love” this is the kind of thing we’re really talking about. It would probably be more accurate to say we’re drowning in joy. All at once you feel nothing like yourself and more like yourself than you ever have before.

I love how Kreeft describes this in the specific terms of Christian faith. He writes: “We leap to God because he leaped to us in Christ, and God leaped to us because he is eternally leaping within himself like a flea circus. The whole of reality is ek-static leaping, a cosmic dance, God engaging in a wild acrobatic display with humanity.”

This is a picture of the amazing love of God for each of us; it’s a love that’s immersed in an inexhaustible ocean of joy, whose depths we could never completely plumb. In Jesus, God leapt into who we are so we could leap into who he is. For us to fully grasp the significance of this kind of love, I think that instead of saying “God is love” we might do better to say, “God is always falling in love with us.”

God is beyond reason

If we think of God this way, it will help us put in place another common misconception we have about God, and it’s this: somehow we have got it into our head that God always has to make sense to us. We equate God to reason. And, though God is wise, wisdom is greater than reason. When we equate God to reason, we end up trying to put God in a box.

The older I get, the more I am convinced that the only way we will be able to make sense of God is if we stop trying to make sense of God all the time. If it is true that God is always falling in love with us and longing for us to return those affections, it follows that at various points in life we’ll be carried away by that love, even irrationally so.

God’s love and God’s ways may be reasonable but they are not merely reasonable. God’s love, God’s delight goes beyond reason. It’s because of God’s delight that we will always encounter God as a mystery.

In Isaiah 11 we have a vivid picture of God’s mystery where we read that “infants will play near the hole of the cobra.” That image of play is an image of delight, but for Pete’s sake…notice where the kid is playing! It’s like Isaiah was watching some movie where the hero is given LSD to induce a dream-like state and we see all kinds of weird things like wolves sharing a house with lambs, cows feeding with bears, lions eating straw and Indiana Jones as a toddler, laughing while sitting on a carpet of snakes. It makes no sense! It makes me want to say, “Okay, Izzy: just lay down while I go put on a pot of coffee for ya.”

Thankfully, looking back on the text now, we can make some sense of it, but even then its meaning still defies all logic and reason. Today we know that in the advent of Jesus we witnessed a child for whom Satan, the great serpent, was nothing more than a plaything. And this is so not because Jesus became so great but rather because God became so small, a child.  The delight of God confounds how seriously Satan takes himself and how seriously we take ourselves, too. God overcomes our desire for greatness by becoming a child who delights.

Conclusion

And therein lies the key if we are to comprehend even the slightest fragment of this God who delights: we must become as God became; we must become like a little child.

I love how G.K. Chesterton relates God to childhood. He writes:

“Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, ‘Do it again’; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, ‘Do it again’ to the sun; and every evening, ‘Do it again’ to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that he has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.” -from Orthodoxy

It's true: we encounter the Ancient of Days most fully when we encounter God as an eternal child, filled with wonder and joy, delight and irrational but truly free love. We cannot reason our way into the delight of God. The delight of God is a leap, it’s a foolhardy attachment, it’s a continual falling in love with those of us who haven’t the first clue how very, very, very much God loves us, how she sings over us, dances his life away, nurses us, carries us, rescues us, and asks us to come out and play. The invitation is to change and become like a child because God is an eternal child. The invitation is to simply enjoy a God who delights. Amen.