Joe McKeever

Touch a Child; Change the Future

An eight-year-old child once wrote to Dr. Seuss whose real name was Theodore Geiss: "Dear Dr. Seuss, you sure thunk up a lot of funny books. You sure thunk up a million funny animals... who thunk you up, Dr. Seuss?"

Brian Upshaw has just re-directed my message for next Monday's noon luncheon at the North Greenwood (Mississippi) Baptist Church on the subject of "how to love children". Brian said, "Pastors who think of children as the church of the future instead of the church of TODAY will find themselves preaching to empty buildings." When I thanked him for that insight, he admitted he heard those words from Andy Stanley earlier this morning in a conference.

Bob Anderson, longtime pastor in our state, once told a seminary audience, "We know Jesus was a happy person because children loved him. Children do not like to be around unhappy people."

A little boy was playing in the yard when he saw a large Chow dog loping down the street, its heavy hair hanging out from its head. The boy ran into the house and breathlessly told his father he'd just seen a lion. The dad, well acquainted with his child's tendency toward exaggeration, said, "Son, you had better be telling the truth." "I am, Dad, I promise," the little boy insisted.

Dad got up and walked to the window and came back. "Son, there is no lion outside. That's just a big dog." Then he said, "Now, I have warned you about telling things that aren't true. I want you to go to your room and talk to the Lord about what you told me."

A few minutes later, the boy was back. Dad said, "Did you talk to God about what you said to me?" The child said, "I did, Dad, and the Lord said the first time He saw that dog, He thought it was a lion, too!"

In 1985, while Margaret and I were visiting with friends Jim and Darlene Graham in Atlanta, we entertained ourselves throughout their city in the day while they were at work. One day, we caught the movie "Back to the Future." I thought it was as good a motion picture as I had ever seen -- enjoyable, thought-provoking, and on a certain level, moving. (The subsequent BTTFs were vastly inferior to the first of the series.)

I walked out of the theatre thinking, "What if we could go into the past some 30 years, and ‘fix' something that was wrong with someone. Give him loving parents. Give her protection from some monster. Encourage that child, teach this one. And then fast-forward into the future and see the difference we made."

I dismissed that little fantasy as the stuff of daydreams. Later something hit me with the force of an 18-wheeler on the interstate: "We can do that. Right now, at this very moment, I am ‘in the past' of some future adult. I can fix some problem now that will make a world of difference in the future."

That realization has colored everything I've tried to do with the children in my church and in my life and ministry ever since. Love them now, protect them now, teach them now -- and you have changed the future.

Clearly, so much of what we spend our time on these days does not bear fruit now nor will it bear lasting fruit for the future. But to teach a child! There is the place to make a sound investment!

Leonard Woolf, the humanist, looked back over his long life and wrote: "I see clearly that I have achieved practically nothing. The world today and the history of the human anthill during the past fifty-seven years would be exactly the same as it is if I had played ping pong instead of sitting on committees and writing books and memoranda. I have therefore to make the rather ignominious confession that I must in a long life have ground through between 150,000 and 200,000 hours of perfectly useless work."

He should have taught a child. Or taken one to the park and fed the ducks. Invited a little boy fishing, bought a little girl a new dress and told her how pretty she looked, volunteered to work in the church nursery, chaperoned a camping trip or helped to feed the children's choir at their next rehearsal.

Brian Upshaw said, "Instead of putting great heaps of guilt on parents on all they should be doing in preparing their children for adulthood, I want to give them simple tools and suggestions."

Once again, he was messing with my message. But he is right.

So, here is my simple tool, my one suggestion for today on how to change a child's life.

Give him a book. Give her a book.

If you are the parent, turn off the television, take away their cell phones and electronic gizmos, and give them a book. If you are a teacher, teach them to read, then give them a book.

If you are the pastor or a grandparent or a friend, give them a book.

Somewhere I read of a new library building on a university campus that was sinking into the ground at the rate of one inch a year. It turned out that the architect and planners had anticipated every aspect except one: they forgot to figure on the weight of the books in the library.

Have you forgotten your books?

In the same undated note in my file, I read of a new $5 million post office branch. At the dedication, the officials made a startling discovery. The planners had forgotten to put in a letter drop. There was no place in that post office to mail a letter.

Let's not forget the basics.

A child. A book. A heart of love. A little time.

And of course, pray. Pray for the child.

Do it the right way, without necessarily telling the child he or she is the object of your intercessions. Pray in faith to a Lord who loves the child more than you do and longs to answer you.

I was walking late one night, saying my daily prayers in a rather perfunctory sort of way, when the Lord invaded my thoughts with a question. "If you are not going to pray for your children, who do you think is?"

I've never wandered from that dose of reality. I pray for the children in my life as intensely as I do anything.

England's Sidlow Baxter, whom I heard 30 years ago and never recovered, said, "Men may spurn our appeal, reject our message, oppose our arguments, despise our persons, but they are helpless against our prayers."

John Newton, he who gave us everyone's favorite hymn, "Amazing Grace," said this on the subject of prayer:

"Come, my soul, thy suit prepare,
Jesus loves to answer prayer:
He Himself has bid thee pray,
Therefore will not say thee nay.

Thou art coming to a King,
Large petitions with thee bring;
For His grace and power are such
None can ever ask too much."