innocence explained

Hello, you. Maybe I know who you are and maybe you know who I am, or maybe we’ve never met and never shall. By way of introduction, my name is Amelia. I was born to wonder and to love and to adore, and that pretty much sums up my existence.

But here’s some more explanation.

Do you know God? I hope you do. Each of us was created uniquely and specifically by God to know Him and be known by Him, to worship and delight in Him, to be intimately knit to Him and loved more completely by Him than even the most perfect of human relationships could hope to provide.

This world God made for us to inhabit is wonderful and beautiful and in some ways inordinately strange, if you stop to think about it.

“I look around at the stuff of the world and I ask myself what it is made of. Words. Magic words. Words spoken by the Infinite, words so potent, spoken by One so potent that they have weight and mass and flavor. They have taken on flesh and dwelt among us. They are us.”
— N.D. Wilson, Notes From the Tilt-a-Whirl

But for all its beauty, our world is also bruised and broken and badly bleeding. This is because of sin. So, even for those of us in whom the Spirit of God dwells, it’s all too easy to give into cynicism and be suspicious, not seeing the splendor shouting in the sunsets and not hearing the song of the starlight.

It’s easy — so frighteningly easy — to forget for what we were made.

This is why I appreciate G.K. Chesterton’s novel Manalive so much. It’s the story of the romantically- and mundanely-named Innocent Smith and his uproarious labors in pursuit of joy.

“If Innocent is happy it is because he is innocent. If he can defy the conventions it is just because he can keep the commandments. It is just because he does not want to kill, but to excite to life that a pistol is still as exciting to him as it is to a schoolboy.” — G.K. Chesterton, Manalive

Joy is not naivete. To be innocent is not to be ignorant. To rejoice in hope is to be a light in the darkness, a cry of triumph in the midst of this war waged against our souls.

That is what innocence abroad is for — to help me, and hopefully you, remember and rejoice in who God is, what He has made us and who He is making us. Join me on this adventure, won’t you?

“Here I am only trying to describe the enormous emotions which cannot be described. And the strongest emotion was that life was as precious as it was puzzling. It was an ecstasy because it was an adventure; it was an adventure because it was an opportunity.” — G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy