Article August 16, 2010 Issue

Cherish your child likeness

Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.—Matthew 18:3

BY SUSAN MACK

When I was in college, I worked for a while as a waitress at a great little hamburger joint called Dino's. But there was a plaque above the short-order grill that I disagreed with. "Virtue is its own punishment," it said. College, no doubt about it, was a pivotal time in my life—that place between childhood and maturity, where the current of the world was saying that all the great things in life were to be found in the pleasures of matter. Somehow I knew instinctively that that wasn't the case.

Oh, I faced some temptations like everybody else, and made some missteps, but the virtue and innocence, the childlikeness and purity that I'd felt growing up in a family who practiced Christian Science—the very laws of freedom from sin, disease, and death—kept speaking to me loudly and clearly. I repeatedly saw the great goodness that flows from the spiritual quality of childlikeness, and I learned in college that the struggle to defend it is not just a nice thing to do, but is absolutely vital to our capacity to make a difference in the world.