By Allison Bucher
Getting older is bittersweet. Older people say I’m still young, yet younger people say I’m considered old. I’m in a weird in between. And though I’m only 28, the nostalgia already makes my heart ache. I’m old enough now to realize that being a child is something most of us took for granted, though at such a young age we didn’t know any better. It’s a mixture of both sadness and joy. But then many things consist of the same two ingredients.
I didn’t know that eating a Flintstone’s Push-Up ice cream on a warm June evening would be a melancholic memory someday. I didn’t know that sitting on the couch before bed watching Three’s Company, Full House or The Andy Griffith Show with my parents would be something I would long for deeply. Nor did I know I would miss staying home from school when I was sick, getting to watch The Price is Right with Bob Barker.
Never again will I experience the joy of coming home after school to watch a few episodes of SpongeBob on cable or the excitement I felt on Christmas Eve knowing that the living room would be full of presents the next morning.
What they don’t tell you about being an adult is that eventually you will mourn the loss of childhood, teenage years and even early adulthood. Yet somehow you still feel like a kid sometimes. Your angsty teenager self will still make an appearance here and there, and your young adult hangs around like a disappearing shadow.
I’ve heard that the older you get, the faster time feels like it goes. Supposedly, if you ask older adults to count to 60 without looking at a clock, they are more likely than you to count the time down faster. Whereas younger people have a more accurate perception of time. Which makes sense, right? As adults we have more responsibilities, more things to get done, more places to be. It’d be pretty hard to count an accurate 60 seconds when it doesn’t feel like you even have a minute to spare.
Yet in the chaos of everyday life, I sometimes find myself frozen in memories. A scent, a song, an old TV commercial can take me back. It’s like time travel, in the softest, strangest way. But the more I sit in the past, the more I realize it isn’t sadness. It’s sacred. It’s longing for something whole, for something eternal.
In my relationship with God, I find myself sometimes longing for the beginning, the early days, when I felt like a literal child in my faith. In a “new Christian” or “who is this Jesus guy” kind of way, back when I took my first baby steps of faith. It was new and exciting and fresh. Similar to when you start a relationship with someone new and want to know everything about them, and when they speak, you hang on their every word.
But over time you grow comfortable with that person, and familiarity settles into the empty seat at the dining room table and the middle cushion on the couch. If you’re not careful, comfortableness can turn into staleness. That is why it’s so important to keep learning about one another. And that is why it’s so important to keep things fun and fresh and exciting in a relationship.
I found myself in a similar place with God just a few months ago. Familiarity turned stale and our walks sometimes took place in silence. It wasn’t that I knew everything about God (and I never will!), but I was paralyzed by comfort. I got all the basics down. I knew the general story of the Bible, but I hadn’t dug deep. I kept my relationship with God surface level, but surface level isn’t where we grow. We grow in the depths.
But to grow deeper, I had to go backwards. Sounds strange, doesn’t it? I had to remember what it felt like for it all to be new again. I had to stand before God, wide-eyed and full of wonder. I had to return to child-like faith – not in immaturity, but in innocence.
Because growing in faith doesn’t mean we have to outgrow wonder. It means balancing spiritual maturity and child-like belief at the same time.
Jesus said in Matthew 18:3, “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”
That verse used to confuse me, but as I’ve grown in my faith, I’ve started to understand. Children don’t come with pride. They come with curiosity. They don’t pretend to have all the answers like we so often do. They believe easily. They ask questions. They wonder.
And maybe all those memories that make my heart ache aren’t just about missing the past. Maybe they’re sacred reminders of a time when trust wasn’t tangled with fear, joy didn’t have to be earned, and a time when everything felt new.
Maybe that’s the kind of faith Jesus was talking about, not a shallow or immature faith, but one that holds on to wonder, one that remembers what it was like to be amazed.
Because the more I look back, the more I realize that sometimes to grow deeper, you have to remember where it all began, not to stay stuck in the past, but to carry that same softness forward, to keep that sense of awe alive, to return to the kind of faith that feels like coming home.
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