"A child is one who accepts even the most extravagant gifts, even the gift of love, not on the basis of believing that he deserves it and not in spite of the fact that he knows he does not, but simply because it is given.. . ..and surely this is a hard saying. After we have given so much of our lives to the task of trying to understand, after we have been so continually anxious lest our faith wither and bear no fruit, then it is a real shock to be told that it is only by not trying that we become, that it is only by not resisting evil that we defeat it, that it is only by losing our lives that we save them. Yet if on the one hand we are shocked by this, on the other to know ourselves at all is to know the truth of it.. . .It is just when we realize that it is impossible by any effort of our own to make ourselves children and thus to enter the kingdom of Heaven that we become children. We are children, perhaps, at the very moment we know that it is as children that God loves us--not because we have deserved his love and not in spite of our undeserving; not because we try and not because we recognize the futility of our trying; but simply because he has chosen to love us. We are children because he is our father; and all our efforts, fruitful and fruitless, to do good, to speak truth, to understand, are the efforts of children who, for all their precocity, are children still in that before we loved him, he loved us, as children, through Jesus Christ our Lord."

-----Frederick Buechner, "Become Like Children," from "The Magnificent Defeat"