Choosing to Go Back to Kindergarten

As a child, I remember when my Sunday school knowledge about God and the Bible became too simple and dull. I was a jaded 12-year-old, having grown up saturated with what felt like dry, moralistic lessons drawn from the pages of scripture. The words faith, hope, love, sin, humility, heaven, the cross, and resurrection stirred yawns. I had heard it all a million times. Was there anything about this Christian stuff that was fresh and exciting? New information that could capture my imagination? As a young adolescent, I began to doubt that there was anything more about Jesus worth pursuing or knowing.

Fortunately, I encountered the real presence of Jesus through some fellow high school students who experienced radical transformation when they surrendered to God. These friends who had not had the same immersion in scripture and biblical teaching seemed to appreciate it so much more. This intrigued me. It wasn’t until I became an adult that I began to appreciate the biblical education I had been given as a child. And as I have grown older, I have returned to those boring words that were hammered into me during Sunday school. I now realize that they were at the core of all I really needed to know.

Back to the Beginning

In 1986, a book was published by Robert Fulghum entitled All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten.* The first essay reflects on how better the world would be if more adults would apply to their lives the principles that children are taught when they’re still quite young. He lists a few:

• play fair
• don’t hit people
• clean up your own mess
• don’t take things that aren’t yours
• say you’re sorry when you hurt somebody
• flush

And there are more. But these are enough to give you the main idea. The author seeks to make the case that people don’t need to learn new stuff to make the world a better place. If we just applied what we’ve already been given, major transformation could happen.

But of course, do children consciously take their “kindergarten lessons” with them as they grow up and apply them to their adult lives? It doesn’t seem so. As we “mature,” we typically view those rudimentary exercises as fitting for the preschool classroom, and that’s it. It was all helpful as a little kid. But as an adult, those lessons are at best cute memories of a simpler season of life. I now need adult knowledge to live life well.

Spiritual Kindergarten?

This is what I see happened to me with all my Sunday school knowledge. I believed I needed new information to make faith more appealing and relevant. All the basic lessons about Jesus and the Bible were pushed aside, as if I had outgrown them. I wanted something “meatier” and “of substance” to satisfy the desires of my mind (and ego). 

It took reading a simple verse one day to jar me into a different way of thinking and believing:

“And calling to him a child, he put him in the midst of them and said, ‘Truly, I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven’” (Matthew 18:2-3 ESV).

It struck me, unpleasantly at first, that qualification for God’s kingdom was associated with being like a child. But it got me thinking about what children are so naturally good at.

• Trusting
• Believing
• Forgiving
• Enjoying
• Learning
• Admitting their needs
• Responding to love

The Important Stuff, Unlearned? 

Interestingly enough, as I have worked in discipleship ministry over the years, the above qualities are what so many Jesus followers continually struggle with. The average Christian does not really need to know more in order to walk in greater intimacy with Jesus. We need to humble ourselves and admit that we have forgotten the fundamentals of our faith, the rudiments of life itself. At one time, as little children, we were experts in all the above qualities. The capacity to engage with and live out all of these was given to us at birth. We have had to learn to not trust, to not believe, to not forgive, to not enjoy, to not learn, to not admit our needs, and to not respond to love. Jesus came to make us God’s children (John 1:12).

When I follow this trail of becoming more childlike, I’m taken back to those early Bible stories and lessons about Jesus I heard as a child. I realize that perhaps I don’t know as an adult, for example, what faith, hope, and love are after all. Yes, I can find dictionary definitions. But to unpack these qualities and immerse myself into them and let them be immersed into me feels hard. It suddenly becomes unnerving and even frightening.

The unpleasant truth is that I often use adult sophistication, the idea of maturity, or “using my mind” as justifications for dismissing all the childlike qualities I do not want to explore. It takes a mature mind and heart to dig into those old Sunday school lessons and follow them wherever they may lead.

They’re Not that Simple

Faith is another way to talk about trust. Many of us are plagued with trust issues we don’t know how to deal with, so we belittle faith as being too simplistic. We end up putting our trust in very unstable things . . . like ourselves.

Hope is about living as if there is real goodness awaiting us in the future. But we are so stuck in a materialistic, nihilistic worldview, we struggle to envision goodness apart from circumstances lining up to make us momentarily happy. 

And then there’s love. Truly understood, it always involves giving the highest and the best to others. But we have been trained to depend on the right feelings in order to love someone. It is now a cheap chameleon word that can mean whatever an individual wants it to mean.

I don’t need to know new things. I need to rediscover what it is that God has already offered and has been trying to teach me all along. It’s okay to know less if I apply myself to know the most important stuff, the “basic” stuff.

It really is true that wisdom is more often found in the sandbox, not the graduate school.

Response:

• What are some of the valuable things I embraced as a child but have since let go of? What would it take to re-engage with those?
• How would I benefit from becoming more childlike? What makes me afraid of pursuing such a path?
• Where in my life can I identify “adult arrogance”?
• Jesus, what more can I learn about faith, hope, and love?

*Robert Fulghum, although a Unitarian Universalist minister, writes in this book some interesting “folk wisdom” that for the most part can be appreciated regardless how one’s theology might differ from his.

(Edited and reposted from February 19, 2024 “Choosing to ‘Know’ Less”)