Kids in Love

Yesterday a student in my daughter’s pre-school class gave her a present.  Over the summer he took it upon himself to make for her a pink necklace because her favorite color is pink and she loves jewelry, especially necklaces.  He didn’t get to see her over the summer, but he was thinking of her and wanted to do something nice.  His mother is one of my daughter’s teachers, and so we joked that they were starting their courtship quite early, and that would give us plenty of time to select a wedding dress and proper place settings for their first home.  We thought it was adorable, and very sweet, but we also could not help but look at the interaction as adults rather than as three year olds.  We assigned it romantic value that it did not have.  No one who eats their own buggers can be romantic, it’s just not in the cards.

This three-year-old boy was not trying to be romantic, because he doesn’t even understand what romance is.  The gift had no strings attached because he doesn’t even understand how to attach strings.  What he does understand is that he loves my daughter, not in a romantic way but in a pure, innocent, and very real way.  When given the opportunity to do something nice for her, he went for it not because he wanted something in return but because he loved in the way only a three-year-old can.

 I think as adults sometimes we lose sight of that kind of love.  Because we now know how to attach strings, it has become very hard to love in a way that we don’t have some expectation of a return.  We’ve lost that pure, innocent love and traded it for a love where by doing something nice I can get something for myself.  We might never say that our loud, but that is often what we do.  This example of love in its purist form reminded me of the love of God by the way it was contrasted with my own love.  I want to love in this pure form, but I know that I am broken and incomplete, and my sin and selfishness often gets in the way.  I’m so thankful that even though I don’t always love like I should that God loves me with a pure love all the time, no matter what.