How God's Knees Got Dirty

I’m good with kids. Kids usually like me.  People assume I’m good with kids because I really like kids, but those people are wrong. The reason kids like me is because I meet them on their level. I physically get down on the floor and look into their eyes. I talk about what they want to talk about. I ask about what they are interested in. Just like adults, kids like to talk about their interests. If you are willing to get down on a kid’s level and talk about princesses, dragons, or whatever is cool to them, they will like you. That is my secret. Use it well.

This secret wasn’t original with me. I learned it from God - because God sent Jesus down to our level. Jesus got down on the floor to learn what we care about. Jesus was God reaching down to us. God got on our level by becoming human.

God created a beautiful world for us. God, the ultimate promise-keeper, told us he loved us. That, in and of itself, should have been enough to ensure our dedication to our God, to His ways, and to His plan for us.  It wasn’t.

Have you ever known a wife who complains that her husband never tells her he loves her?  When you talk to her husband, his response might be, “I told her that once and I haven’t told her my feelings for her have changed, so she should know that I love her.” That husband believes his word is a solid promise, and there is no need to repeat it. It may be true that we should be able to believe a statement forever, but we don’t usually work that way. Wives want to hear how much their husbands love them, and they want to hear it on a regular basis. It isn’t that she didn’t believe her husband that one time he told her, it’s just that as the world beats her down, she wants her man to reassure her of his love.  She wants to be reminded that she is important.

We are that way with God. He told us he loved us. Like a wife, we believed until we didn’t. The evil one is good at putting doubts in our mind. He is good at pointing out what we lack as a person and what our relationships lack. God was so much bigger than Adam and Eve. He was not like them. They doubted his goodness, his kindness, and his ability to relate to them. Satan convinced Adam and Eve that God was holding out on them and that they should want to be like God themselves. We all know that the schemes of the enemy did work and Adam and Eve sinned as a result of their desire to become like God.

(Side rant: poor Adam and Eve. They get to be labeled as the wreckers of everything good for all time. I think it’s really unfair. If it had been Adam and Marlys, things would have gone the same way. Go ahead and fill in your own name as well. We all would have screwed this thing up eventually.  Also, we don’t really know how long they lived in the garden!  They could have done it right for years!  They might have lived a thousand years in the garden, obeying and loving life.  We focus the story on the one bad move they made, but the Bible doesn’t tell us how long they did it right. That was before death existed. My theory is that they only started counting the years that passed after the fall, which makes it impossible to know how long they were in the garden pre-sin.  I’m just sayin’ - give A and E a little slack, you sinner, you! BTW, I’m no biblical scholar, so if you want to tell me why my argument here is lame, that’s fine, but that isn’t really my point… this is just a side rant.)

So, we didn’t believe God.  We wanted someone who looked like us and acted like us. We wanted someone we could understand. We wanted someone we could relate to. We couldn’t relate to the perfectness and bigness of God. We are a stupid race.

God loves us. He wants us to really understand that. He wants us to be with him, to relate to Him, to know him. He knew things didn’t work in the garden, so he made a plan: he got down on the floor with us. He talked about the silly things we wanted to talk about. He explained things to us on a child’s level. He opened a new door for us to understand His love for us.  He put skin on and dirtied His knees so I could get it, remember it, and hold on to it. He LOVES me.

I still forget sometimes. I bet you do, too.  When I start to forget, I try to picture the cross. I try to picture God... with skin on. I try to remember his dirty knees… from getting down on my level to play with me.

Thanks, God, for getting down on my level and telling me “I love you” for the trillionth time.