Rambling for Kirwan Uniting Church Keep in Touch pew sheet 11 October 2020

“Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings” says Psalm 8 in the AV (Archaic Version). Except that our cousins aren’t babes and sucklings any longer, although Leisa and I might fondly still remember them thus. They came up to visit us last week, Leisa’s maternal cousin and his two ‘children’ (now 24 and 21). The, er, babes and sucklings taught this old dog three new tricks. Probably, you know all of them. One was that I noticed that their Prado’s (the 21yo – I thought myself lucky at that age to have a 1960s vintage minivan) front windscreen sun blind didn’t fall down, as mine does. That is because she pulls the sun visors down over the blind. Duh. Another was that her sister could read the Hervey Range Tearoom’s miniscule menu lettering by viewing it through her iPhone camera on zoom. Duh. Yet another was that the accumulated candle wax on our various candlesticks and holders (yes, very 1970s, but that’s what KUC gets when the Presbytery Minister lumbers you with a Baby Boomer) comes easily off if you put them in the freezer.

St Paul declares variously in his letters that we ought not to be like children. “Grow up”, he says. While Jesus says that we need to come as a child to our Heavenly Father. Of course, these apparent contradictions are resolved in context. But for my part, I’m glad that grown-up children can still show a childlike grown-up a thing or three. And anyway, Jesus’ invitation is to all of us, grown-up or growing up or never growing-up: “Let them come unto me.”