On children

I used to think I didn’t want kids.

In college, having children seems like a painfully boring, bourgeois, uncreative thing to do. Plus, you never see any real kids, so ‘children’ becomes equated with an abstract hassle that takes money and time, steals your energy, and resents you later in life.

One time, when I was still at Furman, I told my friends, casually, of course, that I didn’t want kids. I wanted to travel, and serve the poor, and kick it with my husband alone.

“But you love kids,” one of them coolly noted. And everyone agreed.

I do?

I started to notice that maybe I do. I always smile at other people’s kids in the grocery store. Then I walk over and talk to them and their parents and sometimes even plant a kiss or two or on their sweet head of curls. It seems I do love kids.

And since moving to Nashville and getting involved with a church that turns out several offspring a week, I’ve gotten to know some children more personally. And they are absolutely hilarious. And really cute. They say absurd things like “you crack me out,” and they laugh until they make themselves cough.

They also ask you to help them and hold them and love them and teach them. It makes me realize why Jesus tells us to come to Him like the little children, helpless and adoring.