Joy Beacons

Katja, our seven-year-old granddaughter, stepped in it, as they say. She had doggie droppings on the bottom of her tennies. Not just one foot, mind you, but both. Her mother, Maureen, suggested she leave the shoes outside, where they could be cleaned after lunch. An hour later, Adam and Katja went for a walk to fix the problem. She put on her shoes, looked for a good stick, and off they went down the street.

When they came to an appropriate spot, she sat on the curb and started scraping. Thirty seconds later, she stopped. She looked up at Adam with a smile, down at her shoes, then at the brown stuff scraped onto the street. “You know, Daddy,” she said, “this would make a very good meal for a dung beetle.”

The contentment range of unspoiled children is a mile from end to end. Joy beacons, I call them, God’s little ambassadors to cheerless cynics. The laughter of just one child is enough to lift a crowd of fifty. Where do they get this capacity? How do they pull it off so casually, to make happy connections between a shoe full and the disgusting culinary habits of ugly beetles? According to statistics, four-year-olds laugh 26.6 times more than I do. No wonder Jesus preferred the kids to, say, me. To be honest, I prefer them to me too. Young children find equal delight in a puddle or a pigeon, a worm or a waffle.

Throw in a puppy, and joy goes off the charts. “The kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these.” Contentment in the young does not require Disneyland. Just a book on beetles. Or a puppet drinking green milk. Just hearts with the capacity for delight, brains with the capacity for imagination, and spirits with the innocence of sufficiency. Perhaps the statute of limitations for creation wonder