There is one kindergartner at my school who seems especially shocked by her mortality. The smallest hairline scratch is a marvel to her, as if getting hurt at all is an unnatural thing. She tumbles around with the twenty-something other children every day on the structure, climbing and skidding and yelling around. But the tiniest friction set against her near-translucent skin is a subject for scrutiny in her eyes. When something isn't fully functioning, she furrows her brow and trudges over to a teacher. She lifts a small finger, cradled in the other hand, and begins to describe her emergency. Her voice is stricken with surprise and a kind of offense at the way of the world.

The temptation of the grown-up is to brush aside the child's sensitivity, to pat her on the head and tell her to go back and play. But perhaps there is something to her sense of dissatisfaction with a world of stubbed toes, paper cuts, monkey bar blisters, and hangnails. Maybe we become numbed to the small evidences of fracture in our world that play out in our relationships, in our homes, in our cities. Perhaps we become resolved to some of the sorrows and begin to imagine they were intended to be there in the first place. Perhaps it takes someone so full of the vision of Heaven to remind us that sin is a foreign thing we should never become comfortable with.