When you are asked your age you might answer, “I am five. “I am fifteen.” OR “I am fifty.” I suggest that you are five, fifteen, AND fifty all at the same time. When you are fifty, the five year old still resides within you. That is what I mean by saying you are the sum of your past. You are of all the years you have lived AND you are each year you have lived. You are the child while you are the adult.
Children glimpse glory. Children dream big audacious dreams. As we grow older, we forget that childlike enthusiasm for the future. Picasso is famous for saying “All children are artists. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.” He understood that as we grow up and mature, we silence and shelve our childlike view and our childlike faith.
Staying aware of who we are as a child, keeps us flexible and able to approach the throne of God with a childlike faith. A faith that believes that a Heavenly Father will provide for my needs. That my Heavenly Father loves me unconditionally. That my Abba—my Daddy—knows my future is filled with hope.
Madeleine L’Engle in her book, “Walking on Water” put it this way:
“Only the most mature of us are able to be childlike. And to be able to be childlike involves memory; we must never forget any part of ourselves. As of this writing I am sixty-one years old in chronology. But I am not an isolated, chronological numeric statistic. I am sixty-one, and I am also four, and twelve, and fifteen, and twenty-three, and thirty-one, and forty-five, and..and…and….”
The Apostle Paul gives us a great visual picture of this notion of being the sum of individual years in Romans 12: 4–5 when he writes about the body of Christ being one body made of many parts. He writes,
“For just as we have many members in one body and all the members do not have the same function, so we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually members one of another.”
We are each an individual member, but we are also one body of Christ. That is how I think about this notion of being the sum of all the years I have lived. My life is one life, but it is made up of individual days, weeks, years—days, weeks, and years which carry their own experiences and purpose.
You are the sum of your past—even as you are being transformed, renewed, and recreated through Christ. As you move from glory to glory, this side of the veil, your past is an important part of who you are and how you show up in the world. I suggest that that every moment you have lived on this earth is a significant part of who you are today. Whatever age you are at this moment, you are also the child, the teenager, the young adult, and so on. You are the sum of your past.
As L’Engle says, “If I cannot be thirteen and sixty-one simultaneously, part of me has been taken away.”
So don’t let go of your past. Tap into your childlike faith. Be the child and ask your Heavenly Father for that which you need most today. Be the five year old and sit on His lap, feel His loving arms around you. Be five years old and receive the unconditional love He has for you.
Then let your five year old self dance in joyful abandon.
God loves you.
That’s reason to celebrate.