When Innocence Leaves Us

She recalled her life as a child, before she turned fourteen. That part of her past held no secrets, there was nothing to hide then. There was only the peaceful escape that came as soon as she shut eyes, when she simply unwrapped any first thought and let it go, seeing it spiral and dance like a striped, toy top spinning from the hand of her grandfather. The image of her grandfather followed many first thoughts when she was a child, but he’s been dead for years.

Back then, she’d been certain her thoughts she came from angels, those she talked with. Not only the stone angels in her grandmother’s garden, but other angels, everywhere, and not one looked the same. She laughed a lot then, pointing at nothing, and playing with children no one else could see. She opened her mouth to drink in colors, tasting red and orange leaves, purple dawns, dark velvet skies that sparkled with diamonds. She drew into her skin the softness of a breeze, and into her ears the symphonic twitter of birds, the lazy sloshing of the Suwanee, and the sweet sound of silence.

In time, she responded to conversations not yet had, and answered questions not yet asked. While her mother called her ‘peculiar,’ and her father lifted his chin and tightened his lips, her early childhood had been a wonderfully bright world, a world with no shadows--until she turned fourteen. Then it transformed into something colorless and dark as the slow-flowing river she stood in. ---from Faithful, a novel in progress. --Copyright Kaye Park Hinckley, 2016

In our life journey, the innocence we were born with will leave us. We will all be broken in some way. There may have already been a time in your life when everything changed like it did for the girl in the paragraphs above. What did you, or are you, doing about it?

Of course, none of us wish for brokenness, but all of us will suffer in some way. What sort of action will we take when that happens? We might moan and groan about the trouble that has befallen us. We might strike out at others. We might wound ourselves up, like a tight ball of yarn, and wish the world would go away and leave us alone, leave us wadded in our misery.

The girl in the story above was betrayed by someone she trusted. It breaks her for awhile, but then...well, when it is published, you'll find out.

The point is there comes a time when, if we allow God's grace to unwind us, our inner sight will change. We will make an attempt to understand how much God loves us, and when we understand that, we will see things differently. We will be able to surrender our lives to Him. And follow Him.

Our earthly lives are like jars of clay. They can be beautiful but they are fragile and easily broken. The genuine treasure of each life is beyond the container of our bodies. It is not temporary, but eternal.

For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal--Corinthians 4:17-18

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