Early last Monday morning, sitting once again in an airport before most sane people are up, I am waiting on my flight, eating a breakfast sandwich and reading. For just a moment I pause, look up to take a drink of coffee and happen to notice a woman looking at me—well actually she’s a little girl about 11-12 months old. She is sitting at a table across from me and her mother has her back turned. But the little brown haired girl has her eyes fixed on me. So I look at her, wave my hand and smile at her. Immediately she gives me a beautiful smile back, then she blushingly turned her head away and looked down. We repeat the process again several more times. What a beautiful little girl and what a beautiful smile I thought. And then something happened. In fact while not trying to be melodramatic, I don’t adequately know how to describe to you what I felt at that moment. A rush of emotions came over me and suddenly the picture in my mind raced back almost 21 years to another little girl. Funny how the mental pictures remain so etched in our minds and seems so current. In that moment I remembered it as if it were yesterday, our own little girl was sitting at the table and playing those same coy kinds of games with me.  That in itself is enough to shake me up these days, but there was more. I then begin to think again about the little girl sitting at the table across from me and began to wonder, “she is so cute, so innocent and so unaware of the world she is growing up in. I am glad that is the way it is for most children, but will she grow up in a home that loves God? Will she come to understand how much God loves her? Will she have parents that stay together and show her what a real home looks like? Will the church reach her and her parents? Or will she grow up and swallow the values of a god-forsaken culture. Will she grow up and despise God, the Church and lose her soul to the world. We don’t know the answer to those questions for her and perhaps never will. But as I sat there looking at her, it all overwhelmed me and the burden I suddenly felt for her and the next generation so gripped me emotionally that I had to get up and leave. In fact even writing about this has been emotionally difficult for me and brings the burden to reach the next generation back. So why do I write this? It is to remind us of what God reminded me of at that table–we must redouble our efforts to reach them, we’ve been called to reach them and we must remain faithful in the pursuit of them. It means changing methodologies but never the message and it means finding new ways to connect them to the church without compromising the mission. While we still have time, I call you to a new resolve to reach up and reach out to those who we hope will fill the Church, fill the Kingdom and will keep passing on the the message of God’s love to each succeeding generation long after we’re all gone.

What Do You Think?