As I took a seat in the warm, full-of-200-other-people-waiting immigration office waiting for my little number to be called, I ended up right next to the kids' area. About 2 hours in, just as I was feeling reeeally bored of the textbooks I had brought with me, over comes yet another slightly frazzled looking family of gaijin (from India, I think, but that's irrelevant). Their little girl, probably 2 years old, was the most adorable little girl on the planet. Within seconds this girl had started her rounds: clutching a fuzzy koala bear to her chest, she would walk over to a random person, look up with wide eyes, then break out a huge smile, hold eye contact for a few seconds, and move on to the next person.
Without a single failure, every person she approached, from bored teenager to tired Mom to grumpy businessman, met her eye contact (once they noticed her) and returned a big genuine smile. You just couldn't help it, her joy was so contagious. It didn't mean we were happy about the waiting, and we still very much wanted to get out of there ASAP, and that other kid in the corner was still screaming... but somehow that smile brought our focus out of our little self-centered bubbles of paperwork/boredom, and in the midst of it all there was a splash of beauty, of joy.
In a way, I think God is a little like that (or rather, that is a little like God). He wants to be our focus, to get us to snap out of our little bubble, to wake up to His beauty, to share in His marvelously contagious joy.
And now that I think back, as more of us were charmed by this little girl, the simple fact that we were focusing on her and smiling caught other people's attention, too: they'd look at us, then look where we were looking to see what was so great...
"The Lord bless you and keep you;
the Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you;
the Lord lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace." (Numbers 6)
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