A Child's Place

The philosoher Alfred North Whitehead defined children as "our immortality--in them we see the story of our life rewritten in a fairer hand." Whitehead was an optimist. He was someone who found adventure in creative ideas and who could see limitless creative possibility in the artless--sometimes ruthless--honesty of children.

But the honesty of children isn't valuable just because every once in a while they jar us into wisdom and we find ourselves saying, "Out of the mouths of babes ..." Nor is it obvious only when they say the wrong--but embarrassingly accurate--thing in front of company. We've all gathered here because we know that in their very experience of life, whether good or bad, and whether they're on the playground with the other kids or are locked in a closet for two years by abusive parents, they're being honest about what they know about what we, adults, think about them and how we value them. Every time kids come safely home from the playground, they're telling their parents they know how highly they're valued, whether they realize it or not. And every time kids run away from the playground because they don't want to go home or are afraid to; every time social workers retrieve kids from some horrible situation; every time a kid shows up in juvenile detention--in these instances, too, the kids are honestly telling us they know just how valuable we think they are. That's why A Child's Place was established.

What does it mean in today's world to weigh the value o

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By the way, that same teaching is found elsewhre in the Bible. Luke, for one, tells pretty much the same story. And then there's First Corinthians, where Paul, as usual, is giving the Christians of Corinth some very practical advice about how they can plan ahead to support their fellow Christians way out there in Galatia and Jerusalem: "When the first day of each week comes, let each of you set aside in proportion to what he has gained, so that there may be no collection when I arrive" (I Cor. 16.2). If you keep on reading after verse 2, it's pretty obvious that Paul wants to have a clear picture of Corinth's contribution to next year's budget the minute he arrives. He and his colleagues have to be able to make travel plans--Jerusalem, Macedonia, back to Corinth, and on to Ephesus--and he'd prefer not to have to spend time scrambling for donations. In other words, he wants to be in a position to do. He figures the best way to have the budget in place is to ask people to give a little at a time, ahead of time, so they don't feel the financial pinch so strongly and so the toilers in the vineyard don't have to operate in crisis mode. For Paul, doing meant training new "fellow workers and honest toilers" to spread the gospel. For A C

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