Some folks are going to get after me for saying this, but it's that side of a kid that can believe in Santa Clause and magical kingdoms. It's the conception that there is something out there larger than us and that we maybe cannot fully understand in one sense. As we grow older we see the "complexity" of the world and we grow hardened. We lose that hope and just happier innocent outlook. I'm not familiar with the story, but I can imagine from what you said that it involves the story of life and the end of it. The kids can see the forest, the adults just see the trees.
Hi Hammer. Thank you for the reply. I'd like to share something from a book I'm writing which illustrates what you said about "trees" - for that is where I first met God: in the woods. This is a true story I'm writing, about my life with the Lord. It is called The Road to Damascus. This is an excerpt (chapter one).....
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I remember sitting in the woods on a summer day with my Daisy BB gun. I would go into the woods hunting chipmunks. It was not something I consciously thought about. Just a boy with his gun alone in the forest dreaming of becoming a man. At the time I thought being a man meant having a gun and killing things. It was a premature thought, just one of many I would have in my lifetime.
The woods were behind my folks house. The year was 1972. This was a different time, an alien time, compared to now. Back then you could watch TV for hours and never hear anyone use the word 'damn' or see some scantily clad babe hawking personal hygiene products. You could wander the streets or the woods all by yourself and never fear some perverted stranger grabbing you and taking you away to God knows what kind of terror. It was a time when the world looked bright and cheerful and you were happy to be alive and living in it. Nowadays I wonder what has happened to the world. It seems like we have went backward instead of forward. Society is like a cesspit full of weird and slimy creatures and to have any kind of decent thought about it one has to recall days gone by as if supplanting the past for the present is the only way to make it clean.
So here I was, sitting alone on a dead tree stump, my BB gun on my lap, looking around for the little furry critters, which I would shoot and maim and be proud of killing because I wanted to be a man. I remember this well because it was during one of these times that I first contemplated God.
It was interesting how this happened. I'd always been an introverted kid. The other kids would go about playing their games and doing what kids naturally do, but I would be sitting off somewhere away from all this dwelling over life and the world. Why? I haven't a clue. I just did. It seemed it was more important to know what was going on than to just frolic about like an idiot leaving yourself open to whatever may happen. Yes, I did play, sometimes, and this was only when other kids included me in their activities. But this was rare. For the most part I wandered alone. So it was that the forest became my playground, and Nature my friend. Out in the woods I didn't have to worry about being picked for dodge ball or asked over to someone's house to watch TV. Out here, I was included in everything.
Before that day I had watched a TV special about Nature. I don't recall the name of it, but it was about how everything - the trees, the leaves, even the animals - were made up of all these microscopic organisms which had lives of their own. This fascinated me. So that day, while I was sitting there with my BB gun, looking around for chipmunks, I started to think about this. In front of me was this bush, the leaves swaying gently with the evening breeze, and I thought So those leaves have little arachnids crawling all over them and the arachnids have little critters crawling all over them and .... I started to wig out. My mind sort of expanded like a Slinky, following this train of thought, and slowly it came to me that everything - the trees, the bushes, the grass, the twigs and stones on the ground - all had these tiny little worlds within worlds living on them. And then another thought, smaller and softer but just as large, came to me - Who made these things? Certainly we didn't. So then who? I sat there chewing on this in my mind, the sun sinking low beyond the trees glittering between the branches like sparkling water.
Now I'm not going to go into some kind of religious rant here, except to say that the next thing that happened was really quite amazing. Only years later when I was an adult living in that cesspit called society would I realize the full implications of what had happened to me that day. A voice spoke to me, very soft, like a thought that wasn't my own, and it said: I did.
I didn't freak out or run screaming home. I was not frightened or upset. I did not know who was speaking to me, and I didn't even care. I just smiled and accepted it. I knew I was smiling because I could feel myself doing it. I didn't think beyond the reasons why. It was not important. What was important is that I had my answer.
Someone had created these things, and that someone wasn't us.
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I was a child when this happened and I innately knew
who created these things, even though I did not know who He was at that time. I was a child then and I accepted it without question.
