finding the lost sheep – toddler missiology

I really think I need to spend more time with 2 year olds. This past Sunday I ‘did my time’ in the Toddler Room helping with their Sunday School class. Granted, I view this as my payment of sorts to the Children’s program so that I walk with a good and clean mind when I drop my daughter off on Sundays. However, I was struck with the missiological boldness of these kids! The story of the day was the parable of the lost sheep and one exercise they did was to follow a little maze (see above picture) and find the right ‘path’ for the shepard to travel upon in order to ‘find’ the lost sheep. 2 year olds are just amazing in this regard – they dont see the world broken up into categories and sub-sets and certainly dont have a few that ‘one path’ is better than another path. Theirs is a global perspective. In short, EVERY child just colored all over the place – lines were things to break down and the notion of play would have Gadamer come back from the grave and join Riverdance. The question was not one of ‘lost’ and ‘found’ – the question was one of celebration. I ask my daughter Eilidh if she wanted me to help her trace the path leading to the sheep and her reply was, well, brilliant: “huh? I can see the sheep… so doesnt God already know where the sheep is?”