There was a time

Huw Williams | 20:56, Saturday 26 October 2013 | Turin, Italy

We have enjoyed every stage of Kitty's development so far, but this period is particularly delightful. There's a new expressiveness to her manner, a greater immediacy between what she experiences and how she demonstrates how she feels about it.

As I type this I am listening to the same piece of Mozart that I was listening to the other day when she wandered into the room, did a double take while she registered that there was music, and promptly ran around in joyfully abandoned circles for a full ten minutes.

She likes to joke too, to pretend to sleep and wake up to surprise us, to hide, to sneak up behind us and make us jump. This is all new.

It is wonderful to watch, but perhaps more wonderful still is the fact that she is so unconscious of herself and her reactions. She is happy and she laughs heartily, she is sad and the world seems to end. But there is no reference to how she is perceived by others to alter or adjust her reactions, they are what they are. So when is it that we start to temper and dampen our demonstrable emotions? Something happens to us as we get older, that causes us to lose that natural self-expression; Dylan Thomas put it with typical brilliance:-

"Was there a time when dancers with their fiddles 
In children's circuses could stay their troubles?
There was a time they could cry over books,
But time has set its maggot on their track."

As I have watched Kitty closely recently, she is once again my teacher. Whatever she faces, whatever new places or people she encounters, if Mum or Dad (or preferably both) are with her, it is enough for her. In her simple outlook on the world, if we are with her, everything will be well, there is simply no prospect of serious vexation. 

If only we could learn that lesson, and believe the same - in far less naivety, but far greater security - about our heavenly Father!