Rare and Precious

On the way home from school today my eight year old said, "I found a cool rock today. A kid in my class said it was really rare." I asked him to show it to me, so he pulled it out. It was a piece of cement with some plain pebbles embedded in it. I laughed, and my first thought was how gullible he was that he would believe a piece of cement was special.

I set the rock on the table when we got home, but I couldn't stop thinking about it. It suddenly occurred to me that this is one of the fundamental differences between children and adults. Not the gullible part, because there are a lot of gullible adults out there, but rather the way we look at things. A kid looks at a broken piece of cement and sees something wonderful and fascinating; something to keep in their rock collection. An adult sees a broken piece of cement; something that didn't hold up the way it was supposed to; something of no value.

That got me thinking about how fantastic that childlike innocence is, and the way children look at other people vs how we sometimes do as adults. It made me incredibly grateful that my kids don't hold onto every mistake I make as a parent, but they continue to love me and forgive my weaknesses and shortcomings. They keep looking for the good. It also made me think about how forgiving and kind we start out, and what happens that makes us change from seeing people as wonderful and rare, to seeing them as broken pieces of cement. Then it got me wondering; Can we get a little bit of that back? I believe we can. It may not come naturally to us now the way it does to a child, but we can choose. I can choose, and so can you. Look past the differences and find the common ground. Choose kindness. Choose forgiveness. Choose to really look at people and see them. Because even when they might seem to us like a broken piece of cement, every single person is so much more: unique, rare and precious.