Many years ago, some people who became very precious friends entered into a very dark place – my wife’s and my life. We were bitter, scared, overwhelmed, and discouraged following the birth and subsequent care of our boy with multiple disabilities. It was the time when we gave up on God and the church.
This couple did many wonderful things for us in the strength God provided them, and one of the most important things they did was include their children.
Their children had been taught very well about God’s good creation, and they also had been taught very well about how to care for and enjoy babies.
So, while I would sit at their dinner table, arguing with their dad about how God in fact was not good and not right and not helpful and most certainly bad, and capricious and cruel, their children played with my baby boy.
They treated him like a baby boy. They figured out things that made him laugh. They sang songs to them. They made funny noises. These four children surrounded that one child and actually enjoyed him. Very few people actually showed any enjoyment in Paul. Most people were a little frightened of him. Not these kids, ages 9 to 16 if I remember corrrectly.
God was at work in those four children as they played. Even in the intensity of those early months of Paul’s life, God was using their sweet, simple enjoyment to prevent my stoney heart from becoming entirely hard, or, more likely, to begin softening it.
I realize this can’t always happen, and as parents we need to be careful about who is playing with our children. These were unusual young people. They had spent a lot of time with and were entirely comfortable with babies with a good understanding what was appropriate and what wasn’t, and I knew that. My Paul also was not medically fragile, as so many children with diseases or disabilities are.
But when possible, there is something precious about older children playing with younger children that God uses to reveal who he is. And I know it also made their own mother and father happy as well, and proved Proverbs 20:7 true:
The righteous who walks in his integrity—blessed are his children after him!
The Works of God 