SEPTEMBER 21, 2025

  “When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty, I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.” 

― C.S. Lewis, On Stories: And Other Essays on Literature

SONG OF SOLOMON 1-3

5Daughters of Jerusalem, I charge you

by the gazelles and by the does of the field:

Do not arouse or awaken love

until it so desires. (3:5)

2 CORINTHIANS 12

 Therefore, in order to keep me from becoming conceited, I was given a thorn in my flesh, a messenger of Satan, to torment me. 8Three times I pleaded with the Lord to take it away from me. 9But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me. 10That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong.

JOURNAL 

C.S. Lewis admitted that as a boy he hid his love of fairy tales in shame, but as a grown man he read them openly, free from the fear of seeming childish. He said, “When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.” That strikes me deeply because so much of my own life has been a tug-of-war between childish immaturity and childlike faith.

I see the evidence in the way I have often forced things that should have been left alone. I have run from battles that needed to be faced. I have lashed out when a calm heart would have been wiser. I have smoothed over conflict when it cried out for confrontation. I have hated when love was needed, and clung to stubbornness when forgiveness was required. These missteps came not from true maturity but from immature fear and anxiety, old patterns formed when I was young.

At Onsite years ago, I learned that these behaviors are often rooted in childhood survival mechanisms. When life grows heavy, I revert back to them instinctively. Yet there is also something profoundly good about the child within us: the wonder of discovery, the purity of love, and the unashamed honesty of our emotions. Scripture reminds us of this balance. In Song of Solomon 3:5, we are cautioned not to arouse love before its time, an echo of how impatience and forcing things can wound us. In contrast, 1 Peter 2:1–3 calls us to crave pure spiritual milk like newborns an invitation to grow, not by rejecting childlikeness, but by maturing through it.

Weakness, difficulty, and struggle have become my unexpected tutors. In them I am forced to tell the truth about myself, to admit sin, to confess failure. And in that raw honesty, I am driven back to God, not as a polished adult trying to prove my worth, but as a child crying out for a parent. Paul’s thorn reminds me that God’s grace is not a crutch but the very place where His power rests: “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness” (2 Corinthians 12:9).

So, the call is not to erase the child but to redeem him. To let the wonder and purity of that part of me remain, while surrendering the immaturity born of fear. That is the paradox: to grow up in Christ is to become more like a child.

1Therefore, rid yourselves of all malice and all deceit, hypocrisy, envy, and slander of every kind. 2Like newborn babies, crave pure spiritual milk, so that by it you may grow up in your salvation, 3now that you have tasted that the Lord is good.

1 PETER 2:1-3