Children's Stories

I have no words of my own to speak right now, so I share these wonderful words by George McDonald with you. From At the Back of the North Wind;

You see when he forgot his Self, his mother took care of his Self, and loved and praised his Self. Our own praises poison our Selves, and puff and swell them up, till they lose all shape and beauty, and become like great toadstools. But the praises of father or mother do our Selves good, and comfort them and make them beautiful. The never do any harm. If they do any harm, it comes of our mixing some of our own praises with them, and that turns them nasty and slimy and poisonous. 

and;

His father had been very gloomy--so gloomy that he had actually been cross to his wife. It is a strange thing how pain of seeing the suffering of those we love will sometimes make us add to their suffering by being cross with them. This comes of not having faith enough in God, and shows how necessary this faith is, for when we lose it, we lose even the kindness which alone can soothe the suffering. 

and while I'm at it, from another work of his, The Princess and Curdie;

The must be something wrong when a mother catches herself sighing over the time when her boy was in petticoats, or a father looks sad when he thinks how he used to carry him on his shoulder. The boy should enclose and keep, as his life, the old child at the heart of him, and never let it go. He must still, to be a right man, be his mother's darling, and more, his father's pride, and more. The child is not meant to die, but to be forever fresh born.

This is the kind of treasure some of you are missing out on by not reading more "children's stories." Why would you want to have anything other than the true heart of a child in you? May I never grow up,

Caitlyn