Teaching Children to See
by Kelly Givens, Mere Orthodoxy:
This past winter, my six-year-old began each day looking out the window. I would hear him roll out of bed, feet hit the floor, his footsteps moving toward one of the windows in his room. I knew what he was looking for: snow. A little while later he would come down the stairs, still sleepy-eyed, and ask to check the weather app on my phone. Would any of the icons in the 10-day forecast have changed from a sun to a snowflake overnight? For weeks, this was his first order of business. If there was a possibility of snow, he would be the first to report it.
I love his awe and wonder at the weather, at everything in the natural world. I love it because there is so much to delight in on this beautiful planet and he’s only just beginning to discover it. I love it because I get to experience it all fresh again from his eyes. And I love it because it gives me hope that, if he can hold onto his awe and wonder, he just might grow to be a humble man.
In her book On Reading Well, Karen Swallow Prior defines humility as “an accurate assessment of oneself.” She writes that its sister word, humble, means “earth” or “ground.” “The person of humility,” Prior writes, “is literally and figuratively grounded.” This grounded, rooted definition serves as excellent imagery for the role of humility in growing our character. Prior writes that humility has “long been considered the foundation of all other virtues.” [1] We might think of humility as the roots from which the tree of our character grows. The stronger we grow in humility – the stronger our roots – the greater our character will be, and the more virtuous fruit we will grow.
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