Last week on our way to daycare and then work (which for me means school since I'm a high school biology teacher), I looked over to my left while driving down Sycamore Avenue to see a blazing orange sun just starting to peek over the horizon.
"Oh," I think to myself. "That's pretty."
"Elijah," I say to the five year old boy in the backseat. "Look over there...at the sun."
"Where?" he asks.
"Over there. By the..."
"WOW! Oh, Wow!" he screams. "Look at that, Allison! Look at the sun! That's so cool. It's coming up! The sun is coming up right now! Go, Sun! You can do it! Yeah for the sun!"
Elijah stops to catch his breath.
"Harmony, look! Look over there at the sun," he says.
Harmony, my temperamental two year old looks over, whines, and says, "It's too bright."
The rest of the drive to Karen's house is peppered with amazing sun exclamations. We finally arrive and commence the arrival ritual: hats off, gloves off, coats off, boots off, Baby Karis out of the carseat, milk drop off, small talk, leave. But this morning, the kids aren't even through step two before they're racing downstairs to see what the sun has done since they last saw it.
"Allison, it's up! The sun is up! It did it! The sun did it! Hooray!" I hear from the basement.
Maybe this is what Jesus was saying to Nicodemus when he said that we must be born again. And again. And again. And again. Since God dwells outside of time, maybe God is getting younger and younger in a sense, or at least not older, like we are. Every sunrise is exciting to God, I think, in the same way that every story is exciting to kids, which is why they like re-reading the same one twenty times over. When Jesus talks about becoming like little children, maybe he's describing the best, most exciting way to live, a life in which each sunrise is the best sunrise ever and each hug is the best hug ever and each Qdoba burrito is the best burrito ever. We adults are too easily bored and are therefore much too boring. We need kids like Elijah to remind us that nothing about life is ordinary when you are born again and again and again.
