Look, it's Jesus!

A while back I wrote about the wonderful trip that Sophia and I got take to visit my friend Jodi Mathews in New York. While we were visiting, Sophia and I had the opportunity to go to church with Jodi and her family. The Mathews are Orthodox Christians, and their church is beautiful inside. Beautiful icons and paintings of Jesus and the Saints surround worshippers inside the sanctuary. Throughout the service, Sophia was captivated by an icon of Jesus. She would point at it and say, "It's Jesus" or "Jesus is up there". Sophia also enjoyed looking at pictures of Jesus in Jodi's son's prayer book during the service. She would hand me the book and say, "Find Jesus."

The whole experience was very interesting to me on a number of levels. First, it occurred to me that while we sing and talk about Jesus and say prayers to Jesus, we had given Sophia few opportunities to see pictures of Jesus. Knowing all that I do about child development and the visual nature of children, I felt a little silly that I had not given her opportunities to connect an image with the name. I think seeing a picture made the idea of Jesus much more real to Sophia. I was also impacted on a spiritual level, wondering if Sophia's attraction to the image of Jesus was a demonstration of the way that throughout our lives God pulls us towards salvation. Did her sweet innocence help her to see the beauty of divine love? Was God tugging at her little heart through the image of Jesus? Perhaps I'm making too much of it, but the Gospels do tell us of Jesus' taking time to connect with children, so perhaps not.

On a funny note . . . one of the reasons I am writing about this now, almost a full two months after the fact, is in part because we have had a few funny related incidents. It seems that my righteous daughter is now able to see images of Jesus everywhere. Recently we decided to go out to eat for breakfast . . . a real treat for us. We were sitting at our table at Cracker Barrel when Sophia looked at a tin sign on the wall advertising feed corn. The sign had a picture of a muscular man raising his arms in the air. She smiled and said, "Look! It's Jesus!" Last weekend we were at my mom's house. Sophia loves purses, so my mom had given her some pretend money for her purse. Sophia brought me one of her plastic nickels, pointed at the face on the nickel and said, "Mommy, it's Jesus." Jodi, does that make you proud?