Have you noticed how most conversations about children touch on the variable of time? Children are great markers of time. Their presence never lets adults forget of its pace and passage. They help us clarify our relationship with time and in some ways our relationship with our tradition and our God also. Children require that we remember the past and the years that have flown by while we realize the richness of fleeting, immediate moments and while we admit the uncertainty of the next. Children join words like distant and current, close and far, simple and complex as we maneuver a wide and winding path of life with them. Our current, close and simple time with children is surrounded by distant past stories and distant future plans. Our time with children is surrounded by far off hopes and unpredictable, complex possibilities. They are the human condition before our eyes. They are the assurance of God's presence and love before them also.

In our lives of faith, we also know the present in the context of an ancient past and unseen future. We move through our study and worship, our life stories and prayers on a similar wide and winding path with the current, close and simple bracketed always by the distant and complex. We read the words of Jesus and the years between slip away. We find the relevance of long ago and someday questions in the present experience of his words. There the human condition and assurance are before our eyes again.

Beyond our puzzling, it may simply be that we hold and adore the children, as God has held and adored all people through all of time. The children lead us to this grace as past memory and present insight and future longing. They move ahead with enthusiasm and without a doubt even adding fractions to their ages to speed time along. We are called to keep up in pace and in faith. We are so blessed to walk with them!

This Sunday our Pulpit Player children will teach us using the story of Zacchaeus at the 10:30 service. And at both services Rev. Jim Ryan, of the Colorado Council of Churches, returns to the Montview pulpit, so it promises to be a great day.

Zacchaeus was a tax collector, which meant that he was Jewish man who collected taxes for the Romans who oppressed the Jewish people. Doing so made him rich...and hated. We often think of Jesus as a champion of the poor, so what's he doing telling Zacchaeus that he wants to be a guest at his house? For me, it's another example of Jesus challenging our conventional thinking. And it has me asking, who am judging prematurely? Who am I making assumptions about without really getting to know them?

Here's an idea: Be on the lookout this week for someone you are judging without really knowing their heart - like the people did with Zacchaeus. And try to get to know them a little better to see if your assumptions prove true.

"Then Jesus said to him, "Today salvation has come to this house, because he too is a son of Abraham. For the Son of Many came to seek out and to save the lost."