~by Michelle
Truths about God’s love and His plan and His Son Jesus Christ are truths that even children can comprehend. Today, a children’s song came to mind that carries with it this kind of beautiful simplicity — and also points to so many layers of awe-inspiring truths.
This song talks about how we all lived with God before this life. We were given the opportunity to choose whether or not we wanted to come to earth and receive bodies and learn by experience through this mortal journey. We knew Jesus before this life, because He was central to God’s plan to allow us the opportunity to come back Home.
In this life, we have an opportunity to choose God’s plan and to choose to have faith in Jesus — again.
The song reminds me of William Wordsworth’s poem, “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.” (I’d never seen the whole poem before; I recommend reading it in its entirety.)
Wordsworth was an English poet who was born in the later 18th century. His poem articulates this sense that our existence didn’t start here, but that
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:
Wordsworth also acknowledges that as we grow older, experiences of life can leave us forgetting, growing blinded to our divine identity evidences of Light all around us.
But we don’t have to walk blind, in the dark. We can, as the scriptures say, be as little children.
As these children sing, we can “Choose Him Again.”
[Song written by Shawna Edwards and performed by One Voice Children’s Choir]