Or do you suppose that it is for nothing that the scripture says, ‘God yearns jealously for the spirit that he has made to dwell in us’? But he gives all the more grace; therefore it says,
‘God opposes the proud,
but gives grace to the humble.’
If you have a child going into middle school, you might notice how differently they act when other people are around vs when the two of you are together. It almost seems like they become another person. A wise teacher friend once told me that she preferred middle schoolers in groups of 1. My mother has the strong belief that groups of middle school boys divide their collective brainpower in half every time another boy joins the group. (I believe she said this when I was a middle schooler.) The sweet, curious, earnest little child that you once knew is suddenly clever and cold and unrecognizable.
Eventually most children grow out of their middle school phase and become bearable to be around again, but that long stretch of time from age 12-18 or so makes parents and teachers long for their little boy or girl to “just be themselves again.”
That is how God feels about us. There is a reason why Jesus said that we must be like a little child in order to enter the Kingdom. We are not perfect as children, but we are more like our true selves when we are very young than the proud and cynical adults we become. God wants us to be trusting, obedient, and to pitch our tiny-fisted tantrums with the same short memories of our children. I’m not sure He is all that interested in how funny or charismatic or pious we are, but rather in how we run to him and embrace him with the fierceness of a little child.
