Toddler Jesus

This past Sunday I was hanging out with some of the youngest Encounter-goers in Tots, so I don’t have reflections on Pastor Dirk’s message to offer you. As Christmas approaches though, I’ve been thinking about Jesus. Sometimes I forget he was human, that he walked around and talked to people and ate food and all the physical, tangible activities that come with being human. Nativities and storybooks portray Jesus as a serene infant held in his mother’s arms, or the more accurate ones might show him as a toddler when the wise men paid their visit.

While these pictures present a snippet of truth, as I imagine Jesus did snuggle with his mom sometimes, I think they only portray a portion of it. 

Because Jesus was human. 100%, sippy-cup-toting, clapping, shrieking, tantrum-throwing, nose-wiping-on-Mary toddler human. 

On Sunday we sang a few Christmas songs in Tots. As we sang, the kids shook simple handmade bells attached to pipe cleaners--humble instruments, but when you’re a toddler, you hardly notice such things, much less mind them. Some kids shook and stamped their feet, others simply observed and listened, and I wondered what toddler Jesus was like. It feels almost irreverent to ponder it. The Bible tells us of his birth, one story as a twelve-year-old boy, and the next we hear of him he’s a grown man--but what was Jesus like in all the in-between time? He became a grown up, so he had to be a toddler.

Maybe he would’ve been an enthusiastic bell-shaker, eyes gleaming with delight as he realized he had the ability to create that satisfying jingle. Or maybe he would have observed from a few feet away, wary to fully enter the circle but content to see what others were doing. Maybe he would have sat and smiled, singing the few words that he knew and toddler-babbling the rest.

Exactly what Jesus was like isn’t the point as much as the fact that he was a toddler. We’re used to picturing Jesus as a sleeping baby or a fully grown man, but sometimes forget all those years in between, those years of dependence on Mary and Joseph, of discovering what the world is like, of learning how to count and read and how to make friends. These are the things that make up our human experience, and Jesus had them too. 

This is what we remember at Christmas--we don't have an abstract God, we have a God who took on flesh to live among us, to walk like us and talk like us and shake jingle bells like us. He was a baby, a toddler, a kid, a teenager, a twenty-something. The same Jesus who died on the cross to become our Savior was as human as you and me.


[Brianna DeWitt attends Encounter Church and loves Christmas. She also writes on her personal blog at http://awritespot.wordpress.com and tweets @bwitt722.]