There's a lot we can learn from kids. As weird as that sounds, I believe that we don’t allow ourselves to learn as much from them as we should. In church, I once heard the term “Childlike faith” and it stuck with me. Why not have a childlike outlook when it comes to life in general?
Life is hard. We all know that. I am only 19 years of age, but I know that it's easy to let life win. It seems like as the years pass the world seems to get darker and darker and it seems harder with age to see the light at the end of the tunnel, even though we know that it is there.
A few years ago I knew a boy who made me see life differently. His life was cut short at the age of seven, but he impacted more lives than most people ever will. When I remember Jay Parker, I remember his smile. I remember his ability to always make everyone laugh, the way he lit up a room, and the way that not one person could say anything negative about him. But more importantly, I remember how happy he was. Jay Parker had an illness, but that didn’t slow him down. For him to have such a small amount of time yet to reach so many people with his smile and positive attitude is inspiring.
The little moments that we are experiencing day by day have expiration dates that we aren’t sure of, that may come sooner than we wish. But if the moments we have now were to be all that we were able to get, wouldn’t we want them to be great ones? Not full of worry and stress and all the things that aren’t going right, but of love and everything we have to be thankful for. Too often we get caught up in the negative aspects of things instead of thinking of how we are lucky to be alive. I think the older you get the harder it is to be happy. The responsibilities add up and you start to stress over more permanent situations, but at the end of the day how hard is it to just smile and thank God for the people you have and the places you’ll see.
Dr. Suess is still today one of the most known well known authors in the world. When Dr. Suess was writing, he was writing to the audience of children. His words were inspiring and uplifting because that’s what his audience related to. Dr. Suess one said, “Kid, you’ll move mountains!” but no matter the age or the size of the mountain in front of us, are we ever “too old” to move it?
I think that we all want to be remembered in a positive way by the people we come into contact with, but I think more importantly we want to live a good life. So maybe seeing life through a child's eyes is a good way to start.
