Child-like play leads to escape from world, but then thoughts of faith

By David McElroy · March 23, 2012

I had a great time Wednesday night playing with a smart and gregarious 4-year-old in the checkout line at Target. I’ve been thinking about it ever since, both because it makes me smile and because it makes me wonder why so many adults lose the child-like qualities that make real play so joyful.

It was a long line for a number of people. There was a problem with the register, so we were stuck for a couple of minutes. The woman in front of me had two little girls with her, and the girls went to the wall beyond the checkout line to wait. Then the oldest of the two called out to her mother, “Mom, the ice here costs $1.99.”

The mother smiled and agreed with her that that’s what the sign said. She told me the girl had been learning how to read and understand prices.

“That’s not a lot of money, is it?” the girl asked in our general direction.

The mother was busy talking to the cashier by then, so I responded by telling her that it would be a lot of money for a piece of gum, but it would not be much money for a car. We talked about the relative value of money and prices, and she seemed to understand a lot more than I would expect for her age.

Sarah is 4. Her mother homeschools her older brother and teaches quite a bit to Sarah that surprised me. By the time we finished our brief discussion of money, she came and showed me letters on the magazines in the checkout line.

“Letters work different from numbers,” she told me confidently, apparently in the belief that no one had ever taught me this. She then started showing me a game she had invented involving matching certain letters with other letters on other magazine covers. I’m not entirely sure I understood the rules of her game, because she was laughing too much as she tried to explain. She might have been making it up as she went, for all I know.

I don’t remember what she asked me that led me to do this, but I made up a story about how I had escaped from a mental institution and the doctors were out looking for me, liable to spot me any moment and take me away to give me shots to make me not be insane anymore.

Sarah liked this story, but she wasn’t entirely sure which parts — if any — to believe. So she made up her own version for herself. I never was clear who she was on the run from. In acting out the story, though, she was on the other side of the candy and magazine, peeking around the corners and then hiding. You’ve seen children do similar games a million times.

In describing Sarah’s play, I don’t mean to make it sound as though she was a loud brat out of control. She was bright and energetic and times, but always under control and never loud enough to be annoying. It was a delightful experience. For a few minutes, I was completely separated from the adult world that otherwise seems so real. I was immersed in her world — and I liked it.

As I’ve thought about what it felt like to play with this child for a very few minutes, I have trouble describing it. I come back to child-like, but that’s silly, because … well .. it’s like describing water as “wet.” There’s an innocent quality to real play from children, but it somehow goes beyond that. It’s a complete lack of self-consciousness and a complete faith that everything is ultimately working as it should. Even if there are temporary glitches and tears, they’re soon replaced — in most children — with the faith in normalcy and basic goodness.

In the Christian world, you sometimes hear people referring to “the faith of a child,” which is a very loose paraphrase of something Jesus said about which people are going to “inherit the kingdom.” But it’s not just religious faith that requires child-like faith. It’s faith in anything. The more you know — or the more you think you know — the more jaded you are and the less faith you have in anything or anybody. When you’re not able to have faith in something, it seems to make it harder for you to have faith in yourself or be happy with the world.

We all think we need love — and we do — but maybe even more than that, we need someone to have faith in us. We need someone to tell us that we’re special and that they’re going to believe in us — and they’re going to trust that practical things will work out. (At least for Christians, it amazes me how so many say they have faith, yet they ignore Jesus’ command in Matthew 6 not to worry about food and clothing for tomorrow. But as long as you give lip service to faith, it’s OK to act like the rest of the world, huh?)

So that’s what playing with Sarah made me think about. It made me think about what I have child-like faith about (and what I don’t) and who has blind faith in me (and who doesn’t). I’ve seen enough and experienced enough — and let myself fall in to the trap of fear so much — that I don’t have the faith to really play and experience life as a child does often enough. Sadly, I suspect that most people do even less play and have even less faith — but are completely unaware of it.

After Sarah and I had played a few minutes Wednesday night, it was finally time for her to go. As her mother pried her away to head out to the car, my new friend paid me the ultimate compliment. With a huge grin, she looked at me with her big hazel/green eyes and said to me, “You’re crazy — like me!”

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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