joy joy joy!

how I will miss these toddlers... just 2 more days with them!

I can't believe how much joy they've given me the past few months. Even today, when I was trying to be firm with J. & S. today and get them to sit and wait on the carpet by giving them my "I mean serious business" look ... ahh they just started giggling and I couldn't help giggling with them! I FAIL after this whole year of ECE studies, positive guidance strategies and all =P Luckily my Host Teacher wasn't around to see me being silly with them

Backbreaking dish-washing, wiping down furniture, sweeping floor; Skin on palms drying and wearing out from all the hand-washing and sanitizing of tables (really no time for putting hand cream in this field =P); Messy clothes from paint/glue/applesauce etc. all over; toileting/diapering (won't go into details!)...

these all swept aside when these little ones share their joy and laughter and silliness with me! How blessed am I to learn the lesson of simple joy from them!

Joy in rolling ball, the flying kite, the "Itsy-bitsy spider" song, playing "peek-a-boo"... again and again. They're constantly living surprised by joy.

Is that it? The secret to a child's language of laughter, their domain of delight, is perspective.
If the heights of our joy are measured by the depths of our gratitude, and gratitude is but a way of seeing, a spiritual perspective of smallness might offer a vital way of seeing especially conducive to gratitude...

In the upside-down kingdom of heaven, down is up and up is down, and those who want to ascend higher must descend lower. And so "anyone who becomes as humble as this little child is the greatest in the Kingdom of Heaven" (Matthew 18:4). Later I read the words of F. B. Meyer...
I used to think that God's gifts were on shelves one above the other, and that the taller we grew in Christian character the easier we should reach them. I find now that God's gifts are on shelves one beneath the other, and that it is not a question of growing taller but of stooping lower, and that we have to go down, always down, to get His best gifts.

To receive God's gifts, to live exalted and joy filled, isn't a function of straining higher, harder, doing more, carrying long the burdens of the super-Pharisees or ultra-saints. Receiving God's gifts is a gentle, simple movement of stooping lower.
Is this, too, why I'm often joy starved? Why a narcissistic gluttonous world lives emaciated? But the humble joy of small child? This I had witnessed.
~Ann Voskamp, One thousand gifts

"He must increase, but I must decrease" (John 3:30 NASB).