I am looking right now at a green Jabba the Hut my son colored for me almost 2 years ago. He was four then.

Everybody knows that Jabba is brown – not green. And I think even Jabba might be offended at how liberally the crayon goes outside the lines. Furthermore, his message at the top of the paper, “I LOV YOU” is misspelled.

I love it. It will hang in my office for some time. But at 6 years old, I doubt Joshua would present me with such a picture because now, he would deem such a creation as unworthy of his skills. His internal monologue has changed. It once was, “My daddy will love this. He will be so proud of me,” but I fear it is becoming “I didn’t do a very good job. I can do better. I can’t give him something like this.”

That makes me very sad.

I don’t think this shift in thinking is because Joshua is being raised in an environment where he has to jockey for his parents’ love and approval; by God’s grace, we are generous with praise and he knows he is unconditionally loved. Instead, I believe it is the process that happens to all of us when we become more and more self-conscious.

We care about our physical appearance more than we used to.

We notice how our voice sounds in comparison to others.

We, for the first time, start to wonder if we are actually “cool” or not.

But when Jesus tells us to come to Him as the little children, He is calling us to abandon our self-consciousness in a way – to revert back to innocence, to the days when we gladly give our father our pictures of Jabba the Hut with misspelled messages of affection.

Case in point is the account of the miraculous lunch in John 6. There was a seemingly insurmountable issue. The disciples were at a loss. The people (at least 5,000 and probably twice that at least) were hungry. But, as the disciples so aptly put it to Jesus, it would take almost a year’s salary to buy enough food to feed them (John 6:7).

Perhaps you remember the end of the story. Jesus used the gift of a little boy – five barley loaves and two fish – to feed a multitude. But here’s the thing: Are we to believe that this boy was the only one in the crowd that had remembered to pack a lunch for the day? Probably not. Surely there was a conscientious mother somewhere on the hill who had a package of crackers in her purse. So where were all the other volunteers?

We can’t say for sure, for the Bible does not. Maybe their food was spoiled. Maybe they were selfish and didn’t present it. Maybe this boy was simply the one closest to Andrew and so his lunch box got chosen. We don’t know, but maybe…

Maybe the adults in the crowd had the same attitude as the disciples. They were self-conscious about the best they could do, so they kept their lunches to themselves: This isn’t enough. It’s not even worth putting out there. I don’t have anything valid to offer. Somebody’s going to laugh at me if I walk up there carrying this. Self-consciousness drives us inward. To inaction and silence.

Perhaps part of following Jesus is overcoming that self-consciousness. It’s in coming to Jesus with all we have, small though it may be, and giving it to Him.

See, the real issue with self-consciousness is the “self” part. We’re too busy thinking about our own weaknessess and inadequecies to consider the greatness of Jesus. Our focus is on ourselves rather than on the multiplier of fish.

I want to bring my badly colored pictures to God. My measley fish and broken bread. My weak faith and my inconstant prayer life. I want to bring them to Him because I believe that the One I’m presenting them to is bigger than my weakness. Oh, to forget myself and be lost in the grandeur of Jesus.

Here’s to the God of the little children who have not grown too big to believe…