All Eyes

Aden and his beautiful grandma, Mary

My friend, Mary, told me this story about her grandson a few weeks ago. It’s stayed with me ever since, and I have a feeling I’ll be thinking about it long after Christmas is over. It’s one of those “out of the mouths of babes” truths that seems all the more true because of the innocence that speaks it.

Mary and her daughter, Aimee, had just finished decorating the house for Christmas when they heard that five-year old Aden (Mary’s grandson), was on his way over.

“He’s going to go straight to the Nativity and start moving all the pieces around,” Mary said to Aimee, laughing. Aden is a boy who likes everything “just so.”

He didn’t see the Nativity at first.

“Grandma! I didn’t know you got your tree up!” he said first.

Then he spied the stockings. “Grandma! I didn’t know you put your stockings up!”

And then, glancing around the room, he spied the manger scene. But he didn’t say a word. He simply walked over, squatted down eye-level with the pieces, and began moving each one to a spot that seemed just right to him.

Mary watched. One by one, Aden pressed himself up close to the shepherds and the animals, and lined his own eye up to theirs so as to check their perspective, and then “righted” every ceramic figure, turning them all in a circle around the tiny figure of the baby Jesus. And then he said it.

“I want to make sure everyone is looking at Jesus.”

Amen, Aden.