The Path to Jesus

One afternoon after Easter I came home to discover this pathway made by my 5 year old. She constructed it using plastic Easter eggs from the town's Easter Egg Hunt. I asked her where the path went. She said, "It goes to Jesus, Momma."

"Tell me about that," I said.

"It's like that maze thing we've walked on before. You know, the one where in the center we can be close to God," she explained.

"A prayer labyrinth?" I asked.

"Yes!" chimed in my older daughter.

Many of us like to think that our children are innately spiritual. Kids do seem to have a more intimate connection to God than most adults. But, unless we nurture that connection, they will lose it. As children grow into youth and youth grow into adults, we seem to lose that intimate connection. We become more cynical, more rational, more down-to-earth realistic. We lose that ability to wonder, to imagine, to relate to the Creator in joyous child-like awe.

I love to see how my children connect with God through their play and laughter. We forget how to do that as adults because we are too serious. When we let go of the need to control life, God appears all around us, even in a pathway made with those annoying plastic Easter eggs. That's one of the many reasons why I want to be intentional about helping children and youth to stay connected to God through play and ritual, through love and laughter. When we deepen that innate spiritual connection to God as children, it gives us strong foundations for a lifetime of faith. Those strong foundations help to sustain our faith in adulthood when the storms of life try to tear them down.

My girls have grown up with labyrinths in their lives even before they were born. The church I served while I was pregnant with them had a rose and white laminate floor labyrinth in the Fellowship Hall. I often used it with my youth during youth group meetings. It was open to the public every Tuesday for individuals to walk. I know I walked that labyrinth while pregnant with them. I chased the older child around that labyrinth after church when she was a toddler. The movement in towards the center and out towards the world was a part of their prenatal experiences.

When we moved to Richmond to Union Presbyterian Seminary, we discovered an outdoor labyrinth just yards from our apartment door at the seminary's walking track. My 5 year old learned how to walk and run on that labyrinth. I cleaned up skinned knees from when they fell following its gravel path.

I'm not sure exactly how much praying either one of them has ever done while "walking" the labyrinth. They'd take short-cuts to the center, sit for a few minutes, get up and say, "Okay, chase me now!" Yet, when I came  home to see the plastic Easter egg path to Jesus, I knew they understood what the labyrinth was all about, finding God on the path of our lives. God is already there on the path waiting for us. We have to be intentional about noticing God's presence. We have to slow down sometimes to notice! That's why I love the labyrinth. It will even slow down a child long enough for her to feel God's presence, even if it's just for a moment.