As I write I am preparing for a time of celebration with our youngest granddaughter, Lily Mae.  She recently turned two, and her mom and dad have invited her granddaddy and me, as well as her grandmother on her dad’s side, to a time at Disney in Orlando.

Lily Mae has a tiny face with giant eyes of wonder and delight.  She has a sunny disposition and a smile that will light up any room. 

No doubt we can expect to capture many pictures of her eyes of wonder and her bright smiles as she has a chance to enter the Magic Kingdom and to become friends with Mickey and Minnie and Donald and all the characters she has come to know and love! 

William Wordsworth wrote a poem entitled, “Ode: Immitations of Immortality.”  The long poem is something of a lament as heard in the words, “The things which I have seen I now can see no more.” 

Wordsworth, of course, does not mean to imply a literal inability to “see.”  Instead he wants to convey that sense of the “magical,” the mystical, the ethereal that so easily are a part of a child’s everyday experience somehow becomes lost in the world of the adult.  He decries the sense in which rainbows and roses and the light of the moon become common, everyday objects that no longer produce magical delight as adults behold them.

Wordsworth understands this phenomenon to stem from the fact that children have an undeniable connection to heaven and heavenly things.  In the aging process, however, Wordsworth understands human beings to experience a “forgetting” of things heavenly.  There is a loss of the “magic,” a waning of wonder and delight, a lessening of the joy conjured up from simple things and simple experiences in life.

I am thankful for grandchildren.  Perhaps they are a part of God’s way of reminding us of the wonder and delight we knew at a different stage of our lives.  Perhaps, just as we receive literal invitations to the Magic Kingdom, we also gain opportunities to see the world once again through the eyes of a child.  And if we pause long enough—if we don’t hurry on to the next thing and the next thing and the next thing—maybe we will remember the things heavenly. Maybe we will re-connect to the wonder and the joy of life that God intends.