A Mother’s Nourishing Face of Love
“‘I wish I had thought to watch when God was making me!” said a child once to his mother. “Only,” he added, “I was not made till I was finished, so I couldn’t.’ We cannot recall whence we came, nor tell how we began to be. We know approximately how…
Childhood’s Learning
“LEARNING stamps you with its moments. Childhood’s learning is made up of moments. It isn’t steady. It’s a pulse. —Eudora Welty
The Importance of Learning to Ask Good Questions—
“Once you have learned how to ask questions—relevant and appropriate and substantial questions—you have learned how to learn and no one can keep you from learning, whatever you want or need to know. Let me remind you, for a moment, of the process that characterizes school environments: what students are…
Just a Piece of Paper?
“Like everything which is not the involuntary result of fleeting emotion but the creation of time and will, any marriage, happy or unhappy, is infinitely more interesting than any romance, however passionate.” — W. H. Auden
Listening, Learning to See, Finding a Voice
“When I was young enough to still spend a long time buttoning my shoes in the morning, I’d listen toward the hall: Daddy upstairs was shaving in the bathroom and Mother downstairs was frying the bacon. They would begin whistling back and forth to each other up and down the…
Remembering Childhood
“I can remember the feeling of swinging—how hard we would work for those split seconds, flung at furthest extension, just before the inevitable downward and backward pull, when we felt momentarily free of gravity, a little hiccup of suspension when our hands loosened on the chain and our torsos raised…
Being in God’s Presence
“…for we are being prepared for the playground of heaven.”
Teach Children to Laugh and Play
“He that plays when he is a child will play when he is a man.” John Wesley
“For the end of imagination is harmony [and] the one who justly estimates the imagination is anxious to develop its operation in the child.”—George MacDonald
“For the end of imagination is harmony. A right imagination, being the reflex of the creation, will fall in with the divine order of things as the highest form of its own operation; ‘will tune its instrument here at the door’ to the divine harmonies within; will be content alone…
Cultivating a Christian Imagination through Story and Metaphor
There is beauty of, and freedom in, a biblically informed imagination. To cultivate such an imagination one must understand the purpose of stories, the importance of metaphors, the value and necessity of poetry as well as an appreciation for music and art—of allowing “our faith and our imagination to dance…