Children's Stories

Last week I did a rigorous update of my pop culture awareness, by that I mean I got caught up on a handful of movies that I have either wanted to see, or felt obligated to see. One of the movies that I thought would be intellectually beneficial was the recent feature length interpretation of Dr. Seuss’s Horton Hears a Who…seriously.

For those of you who haven’t seen it, or do not remember the story from your childhood, there are two dominant themes that stood out to me. First, is the value of keeping your word and honoring your commitment, and then also is the indiscriminate value of human life. You see, Horton, the protagonist elephant, makes a promise to the people of Whoville to secure their world, which is contained on a spec of dust, to a place of safety and order. Horton goes to great lengths and subjects himself to extraordinary peril for two reasons, because he made a promise, and because life is important.

As I was thinking about the profound truth found in this imaginative parable, I started to consider other childhood stories and lessons that I was taught through children’s books. I found myself recalling some serious lessons, deep rooted principles, and pure values to practically apply to the way I live my life. While the lessons are straight forward conceptually, they are not simple, especially when it comes time to apply them to every day life. As I thought deeper I began to realize that a great division often exists between many of the principles we learn and how we apply them to our lives.

Somewhere along the line we become jaded, we stop seeing the world as it should be and begin to see it as it is. We dissect the principle truths that we once thought to be absolute and make them conditional. We compartmentalize the lessons we’ve learned pragmatically into portions of truth which we feel are practical and portions which are impossible for application. The truth of our values is then deduced and manipulated into a conditional mechanism that we fit into our realities, when in fact our realities should be shaped by these core values in their purest form. By no means are all children’s stories gospel truth, but contained in them are a number of life shaping lessons that all too often we as adults deviate from as we slowly are broken down by the real, not ideological, reality in which we must live.

The strange part is that we see and are inspired by the same lessons in thousands of contexts, yet we still fail to implement and secure these values as foundational elements of our relational, professional, and spiritual lives. When we fragment truths and values it is no wonder that we end up with something lesser than the anticipated outcome of a value-centered life. If wisdom, truth, and principle are present in our lives only in the event that they are practical then what do we have? We have lives that posses virtue only to the extent that virtue is found to be profitable or reasonable. In the end it is a self fulfilling prophecy, because we only partially sew the seeds of truth, we partially reap, and yet we end up frustrated that our crops are not bountiful.

So what if we fully embraced the principles of our youth and the lessons we once believed to be so profound. What if we took the lessons we were taught as kids, the lessons we teach our kids and embraced them completely? Would life look different? I believe so.


Think so some of the lessons found in our children’s stories –
Never give up
Share
Keep your word
Preserve in hard times
Love the people around you
Respect the things that make us different
Have big dreams, maintain hope

The list is long, and could be a blog in and of itself…but think of the possibility of these principles being absolutely and practically applied to our lives. The implications are substantial.

There is a reason that Jesus said that one of the keys to experiencing God’s glory was to make yourself as a child. In doing so, we not only take conceptual principles as being noble, but we BELIEVE that they are possible in our lives.

Children’s stories are almost always marked by a sense of imagination and wonder, and this is most certainly the key to bridging the gap. If we can imagine how our lives might be different by embracing truth, then maybe we’d embrace it…and subsequently maybe the lives of the people around us would be changed.

We as grown ups place so much value on being on a higher plane of thought, however I contest that there is value to living life by principles not of a higher plane but rather that of foundational truth, simple truth. For me I am realizing I have a lot to learn and much to implement in my life from the stories of my childhood, and I can’t help consider how much better I would be as a person if I embraced those things wholly, just like Horton did. He didn’t rationalize his way out of a promise…his values didn’t change because of the size of the people he made a promise to…his values were a core foundation for the way his life played out, and it created a marked result in the impact he had on those around him. This most certainly comes at a cost, but at the same time we stand to reap great benefits and live lives that are blessed and bless those around us in new, big, and simple ways.

CP