My daughter, Sparrow, is just a little over a week old now.

Sparrow laughs in her sleep sometimes.

Big smile and then a little baby laugh.

I wondered about that the other day.

A week into a life, you don’t really have a big repertoire of experience to draw from.  You don’t have a lot of happy…or sad…experiences.  You start out fresh…tabula rasa…and collect “reasons to act” as you grow into being a fully formed human being.

That could be what’s going on, at least.  I don’t really know how a lot of stuff really works.

I was watching her sleep, getting a kick out of her smiles, when I thought, “What if she’s smiling about a remembrance of being with God?”

That would be pretty amazing.  I know she spent more time with Him than she has with us…and she’s little enough that she hasn’t had time to forget yet..so maybe she’s smiling about something good. Maybe she’s smiling about something good….like God?

Now, some people may say that “it’s just gas”.

That’s a possibility.  Our little girl may just need to expel a lot of gas.  She may be full of it and just needs some pressure release.

Ssssssssss or Brappppp….from my own experience, either way works.

That may be the reason she’s smiling.

But I think it’s a lot more accurate, and certainly more poetic or romantic, to suppose that she’s smiling because she’s remembering bouncing on God’s knee.

I think that we come from…and, eventually…return to God.

We’re given to this life for a short while…and then we return.

That’s pretty straightforward.

That’s a simple…maybe simple-minded?…theology…that we are “given” to this life and that at some point…hopefully at least a little ways into the future…we are allowed to return.

It is a gas…I guess the pun is too obvious not to be intended…to see Sparrow smiling in her sleep.

I remember, even at the youngest age, hearing and knowing that “Jesus loves the little children”. That was an accepted truth…that I was loved and that God loves me.  It was a simple message that was approachable for a little child.

“You are loved”.

That’s a powerful message to be conveyed in a few words.

Now I suppose I could insert some footnotes…pull out my thesaurus…cite multiple and learned references and kind of muddy the pool a little….make things opaque enough that unless I had someone with some “spiritual training” to explain things to me, I’d never be able to decipher what it really means to be a Christian.

Or, better yet…maybe I could just sit in a pew somewhere and listen to all the Latin….just take someone else’s word for it that God was in the house.

Or I could just look at a baby’s face and see that smile…and marvel that maybe it isn’t just gas.

Maybe she knows something that I’ve forgotten.

There is a connection that we run from.  We put up as many distractions as we can manufacture.  We busy ourselves to avoid what can’t be escaped.

“We are loved”.

Sparrow knows that.