Last Sunday, our church met together with ten of our sister churches for a combined service. Individually, our churches are small and spread out in local communities across two counties, but once every two years we all come together and it’s glorious. The singing. The shared fellowship, and vision. The friends we haven’t seen in a long time. It’s good to remember that we’re in this together.
One of the illustrations in the sermon was about how, in Christ, God’s children don’t need to wonder about his love for us, like someone pulling petals from a daisy saying, “he loves me, he loves me not”. In Christ, we are secure, and every petal is, “he loves me”. Isn’t that wonderful? As I listened, I noticed a friend of mine a couple rows up doing something I’ve never seen him do before. Kevin is a leader in his local church, and a careful theologian. He teaches for our local Bible college, and is currently finishing up his doctoral thesis on the work of the Holy Spirit in the Old Testament. Yet there he was, drawing daisies on a sheet of paper. Petals, leaves, stems—and big, happy smiles.
I’ve seen Kevin put a number of impressive skills to use, but this was a new one for me. He draws a pretty good daisy, in fairness. As soon as he finished, he gave the picture to his very young daughter, who was sitting beside him. Her smile as she took it was at least as big as the happy daisies he drew for her. Then the colours came out—yellow, pink, green, brown—she was concentrating hard, working to stay in the lines and bring beauty to her dad’s simple sketch of the sermon illustration.
A smiling daisy may not look like theology, but from where I sat two rows back, I saw fatherly love and care in action—and if that’s not theology, I don’t know what is. Kevin’s care for his daughter filled the outlines of the family God gave him with beauty, even as his daughter filled the lines he gave her with colour. Sometimes, the best way to express careful theology isn’t to explain it in class. Sometimes, it’s to draw happy daisies on a spare paper for the little girl sitting beside you.
