I am not responsible for anything I say or do before the second cup of
coffee in the morning--especially on Saturday morning--so I was not particularly enthusiastic when my five-year-old son, Bruce,
came bouncing into the kitchen full of energy and beaming like a miniature
Buddha.
"You look happy," I said.
"Yup, I'm happy." He proceeded to load a cereal bowl with Captain-Somebody's
crunchy flakes.
"How come you're so happy so early in the morning?"
"I saw Lord Jesus last night."
I was suddenly wide awake. I was almost certain he had never heard the words
"Lord" and "Jesus" put together that way. My wife and
I did not use the term. I had been on an aircrew since before this child
was born, and during that time we hardly attended church at all. Where was
this casual comment coming from?
While I thought about what he said and how I should respond to it, my cheerful
son was eating his cereal. I decided to play it down
the middle--not to make a big thing out of nothing, and at the same time
not to squash something if it happened to be real.
"What did Lord Jesus say?"
"He didn't say anything."
"What did he do?"
"He just smiled with his light."
I swallowed rather more coffee than I intended to. One might expect to find
those words in the vocabulary of a fully developed mystic, but a five-year-old?
Again, I selected a response to match his casual, matter-of-fact attitude.
"Was he pretty?"
"Oh, yes. He's always pretty." With which he hopped down from
the chair, smiled sweetly, and
went outside to play.
I sat there with my coffee and my thoughts--including the firm conviction
that what I had just heard was a factual report by a qualified observer.