Innocence
When I was a kid I was lucky enough to get to go out and about with my dad a lot! He owned his own business and some of my earliest memories revolved about riding around with him as he ran errands and attended business meetings. For some reason I remember as I was leaving some stores and banks that they had measuring tapes by the door and thinking about how cool it was that you could see how tall you were so easily. As I got older I slowly realized that the measuring tape was not there to aid customers, but rather to aid in getting a good description of the height of people that had robbed that store.
Now I never remember my dad correcting my exclamations of joy relating to being able to measure myself by the door. He could have easily explained to me the truth, but what good would it have done. It reminds me of one of the characteristics that God has as our father. He wants to protect our innocence, there is evil in the world but he doesn’t want us to experience. He wants us to live and experience a life full of the true joy found in the goodness of God. As we grow up, we probably will experience the evils, but in due time. We live in an ugly world and experiencing the evil does not make us grown up, if often makes us scared and jaded. So many times young adults think that they need to experience the evils of life for themselves, they choose not to heed the advice of their elders, how stupid are we to think that we know better than the thousands of years of humans that have lived before us. How stupid are we that we choose to bring pain and suffering on ourselves all under the guise of our selfish pride of wanting to do it on our own.