This picture changed my life.

One of my favorite things to do is to let kids take my camera. Not my phone or a cheap point and shoot, but my DSLR. I want them to know that I trust them. And I love getting to see things from their point of view. I spent the afternoon at camp last week, and when we went on a walk to pick blackberries, I gave my camera to 4-year-old Ellen. Look at this kid:

Of all the kids I know, Ellen’s love for me has transformed me the most. One of our friends once told me that Ellen loves me so much it’s almost creepy. But I’ll take it, because I love Ellen so much. I pray all the time that I’ll be the kind of person worthy of all the love her little heart has to give me, because her love comes with a bunch of trust and vulnerability and adoration. It’s the kind of love that can build or can easily destroy. I want to build. Only build. Jesus said that if you lead a child into sin, it would be better for you to have a millstone thrown around your neck and be tossed into the sea. DIE. It would be better to die than cause a child to sin. Are. you. kidding. me. I look around and my life is FULL of children. So many opportunities to fail.

I was looking through the pictures Ellen took and I saw a picture that started changing my life the minute I saw it.

Before I post it, I want to point out again that my life is FULL OF CHILDREN. First, I am a youth pastor. One of those cradle to college ones. Second, I spend my days off traveling – sometimes in my car a few hours, other times in a plane for a few hours – to see my friends and their children, who are also my friends. So when I say my life is full of children, I’m not even kidding.

So here’s the picture.

At first glance it just looks like a picture of my camera and my shorts and the bottom of my shirt. I almost just X’d out of it and deleted it. But then I realized this:

This is how Ellen sees me.
This is what it looks like when she takes a camera, keeps it at eye level, and takes a picture of me.

Unless she looks up:

or is at a distance:

But neither of those satisfies the words of Jesus, when he says “whoever welcomes one of these little children in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me does not welcome me but the one who sent me.” (mark 9:37) When we welcome people, we want them to be comfortable. We ask them if they’d like something to drink, or to take their coats off or would they like freshly baked banana bread or something. Welcoming someone means bringing them in and making them comfortable.

Straining your neck isn’t comfortable. Having to talk louder to be heard isn’t comfortable. Having to stand far away to get the whole picture isn’t comfortable.

I thought of something Pastor Matt once said years ago. In Exodus 34, Moses goes up to Mount Sinai to get new tablets to be written on because he broke the first ones. Verse 5 says “Then the Lord came down in the cloud and stood there with him…” Pastor Matt said, “No matter how high we climb, God has to stoop to deal with us.”

God comes down to us. We strain our necks and talk loudly but in the end he meets us where we are at because we can only go so far.

That picture Ellen took convicted me to my core, because I don’t want for Ellen to grow up not feeling comfortable or welcome in my life. I looked at a bunch of pictures of me and Ellen over the years and there are so many of them where we are on the same level, which encouraged me and told me that I’m on the right track, but my prayer is that I never get tired of the work involved in being loved by children.

Told you her love transforms me. Thanks for always changing my life, Ellen age 4 (1, 2, 3 also + beyond)!