Last night, I walked into my office to find an explosion of kid scissors and paper scraps.
There is always collateral damage to my boys creativity. As I yelled for them to come clean it up immediately, I went back to the living room to pause and admire the sea of creatures that was born out of all that mess.
Earlier in the day, they had brought me a pile of carefully cut and selected pieces of paper. “Mom, can we have some tape please?” As I fed them piece after piece of tape, I watched the scraps of paper form into dinosaurs and robots and other unnamed creatures. “We are creating models, mom… so we can play with them.”
They were making paper models so they could bring the stories in their heads to life. As I fed them each piece of tape to affix this arm or that leg, I listened to them talk about the world they were making. A world of dinosaurs and robots and people all playing and interacting together.
At one point, a twin struggled with the super long neck of his newly constructed dinosaur. “Mom, it just won’t stay up,” he lamented.
“That’s okay,” his brother chimed in. “You see that dinosaur is crouching down to be at eye level with the other creatures so they can hear each other better. Oh and so he can more easily reach the yummy grass they are all eating too!”
Don’t you want sometimes to just live in the world children create? To jump right in with both feet into their imagination?
This morning as I look at their creations, my prayer is that we, as adults, can model a real world for them that mimics their make believe – a new world where everyone is welcome to the table and all are bending to eye level so they can hear one another better.
“We must learn to live each day, each hour, yes, each minute as a new beginning, as a new opportunity to make everything new.”
– Henri Nouwen
