Space For Wonder By Nell Campbell

This past Sunday morning, after I shared the story of Creation with our 4th & 5th graders, a student asked if I thought God sat up late and made a plan for the next day, and the next, each evening preceding every day of creation. I sat for a moment as the inquirer went on, wondering aloud what that would be like for God with no one to talk to or make plans with. The immensity of that aloneness overwhelmed me for a moment, and I couldn’t think straight. 

 Luckily for me, in Godly Play we are not called to have firm answers. We are content to wonder about the mystery that we observe. And so, we did, we wondered about the time before everything when God was just God alone, before Creation. And about making plans. It has been my few day’s reflection. 

 This happens almost every time I get to be the storyteller in Godly Play. I’m given the gift of hearing a young wonderer’s mind frame a point of view spectacularly different from my own. What about those godly plans? I certainly plan. I probably make more plans than I need and have since high school. I’ve always thought planning work helps me wrestle with the idea, or task, that I’m getting ready to take on. I have lists, outlines, color coded calendars of various styles for different parts of my life, short term projects and long term goals. And just before St. Patrick’s Day this spring I, like most all of us on the planet, had to start unplanning. 

I hated making all those changes, to cancel so many things I was excited to do, see, and learn. I’ll probably be able to reschedule a lot of them for future months and years, but I was surprised by how this upended the way I’ve thought about life for the past 30 years. And sitting without any plans for most of this year has made me feel like the year is going to waste. This grief was churned up on Sunday wondering about how God might consider all this planning I had surround myself with. I have been wondering if I’m using my plans as shields against the stillness that would mean I have to actually engage with my soul and God without the backdrop of busyness. And then this morning I stumbled upon these few lines from T.S. Eliot’s Little Gidding: 

    We shall not cease from exploration
    And the end of all our exploring
    Will be to arrive where we started
    And know the place for the first time.
    Through the unknown, unremembered gate
    When the last of earth left to discover
    Is that which was the beginning;
    At the source of the longest river
    The voice of the hidden waterfall
    And the children in the apple-tree

Alright, I get it now. Pay attention to the questions children ask. They may be asking the questions we grown ups should be asking, too.