Dots on their noses...

"No dots on their noses!  No dots on their noses!", experts shriek to our young parent minds.  No dots on their noses, no scrapes on their knees.  Protection is key!  Add years to the lives of your children!  Add fences and kneepads and hats with wide visors!  Get results!  Results.  Results.  Yes, results of pasty white skin... perfect, untouched skin.  Results of beautiful, unbashed knees.  Results of no dots on their noses.  And the stories our children will tell?  Stories of protection and fences and life behind these.  When their dust turns to dust, will they be met with the dirt they have loved?  The dirt they have claimed under their nails from mud pies and worm farms?  When their dust turns to dust, will they have laughed and told stories of this scar and that?  Of these dots on their noses from running wild and free in their sun-splashed yards?  "This world is scary!", expert voices ring in our brains.

"This world is your playground", God wishes me to hear.  Dots on their noses.  Skins on their kneeses.  Mud pie in their nailses.

How much easier for my generation of parents to say, "Stay inside awhile, play a game, grab a remote, read a book.", than the harder to swallow, "Go.  Go play and get dirty.  Get messy and goopey.  Get dots on your noses and scars on your knees.  These may wear on your body and tear on your cells.  Better a short life lived hard and exhilaratingly.  Better a life bursting with adventures to tell!  Those dots on your noses are smiles on my face.  Those scars on your knees are stories worth telling."

So that when they meet their Creator face to face for the first time, they are bubbling with excitement, "Wow, God, thanks for that life, for that place!  I explored every inch, dug holes, and jumped high!  I loved that earthplayground you made!  Did you watch me?!  Did you see?!  I used up my body on all those adventures, now please give me a new one, I hear the adventures here are even better!  I used my old one all up, so I'll need a sturdier, hardier one this time around.  I need some new knees and a nose for all the new dots I'll get on the adventures that I hear are crazy up here!".

Life with few fences...a hard one for me, the parent, to swallow.  But dots on their noses and skins on their knees...are worth sending them out and biting my lip knowing that God watches in delight as His children play hard in this land He has made.