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Truly I tell you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it. Luke 18:17 (NRSV)"It's not only more blessed to give than to receive," says Frederick Buechner, "it's also a whole lot easier."It's easier to give, because we then work from our strength. We work from the human resource center that God has opened in each of us. We offer somebody a willing hand or an encouraging word, and we know we've been on holy ground. We've gone into union with God. Even our tears can bless a suffering person with the knowledge—the irreplaceable knowledge—that he matters to us, that his suffering makes us suffer. Because of the bounteous way we've been created, we have value to confer on others, and we've got freedom to decide how much value to confer, and when to do it, and to whom.Of course we make bad decisions all the time. We give full attention to people who don't need it and we ignore people who do. We give a lot to people who are already full, and we scrimp with people who hunger—maybe people who hunger for no more than a word of praise. We try to give something to someone, but we go about it in a patronizing way that makes the recipient wish we hadn't bothered. We mess up our giving all the time. Still, to have something to give is to be like God.So what if you didn't have anything to give? What if you had to be on the receiving end all the time? You'd feel passive. You'd feel dependent. You'd feel as if your balance of trade was way out of whack. Many people worry about this. They think, What if I get so sick that strangers have to give me a bath? What if I get paralyzed? What if I get caught in some disastrous sin and need help just to get out of bed and face the wreckage?One of the terrible realities we saw in the news last year was the way Kosovar children inevitably saw their parents. The parents were forced out of their family house before the eyes of their children. The children would see a paramilitary goon roust their mother, plant his foot in her back, and shove. It's terrible to see one's parents humiliated by threats and blows and curses. And then the long, weary march to refugee camps. Kosovars often arrived at refugee camps that were already jammed. In these camps everybody is thirsty and bone-tired, and everybody stinks. Part of the degradation is that under these conditions parents had nothing left to give—not even to their own sons and daughters. Children who were accustomed to seeing their parents as providers had to watch their parents get in line and wait for help just like their children.Dependency can feel like a sorrowful thing. We don't like to be dependent. In one of his books Scott Hoezee points out that all the forms of dependency we hear about have a stigma attached. Who wants to be welfare de pen dent or codependent? How many Christians relish a chance to depend on help from deacons, to need aid from their congregation's Agape Fund? What nation would issue a Declaration of Dependence and hope it would stir the blood of patriots? I think we understand very well that it's more blessed to give than to receive. We understand that it's easier too. A giver has power. A giver has options. A giver may choose to dispense grace or withhold it, almost like God.And so we find ourselves surprised that Jesus is so impressed by children. In Luke 18 Jesus blesses some babies, and then he says to his disciples, Look here. You ought to be like this. The kingdom of God belongs to people like this. And you're never going to "get it" unless you learn to receive the kingdom as these children do.Like a child. Here, of course, is where centuries of preachers have gotten sentimental. Here is where we hear all of the virtues of children, including imaginary ones. But Jesus wasn't sentimental about children. As James Breech writes, Jesus knew they could be perverse, and he says so when he describes children who get themselves in a snit. Their playmates complain about them: "We played the flute for you, and you did not dance"

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January 10 2000, Vol. 44, No. 1