Mom Heart Moments #185

Watch over your heart with all diligence, for from it flow the springs of life.

FOR SEVERAL YEARS WHEN OUR children were younger, we had a friend living in our home. David, a ten-year-old boy, was so delightful that we would spend hours on the couch sipping hot chocolate and listening to his stories with rapt attention. (Oh, I should mention that David was not a real boy; he was a literary character, the namesake of the 1916 novel Just David.)

Clay and I thought young David was such an appealing literary model of a wholehearted child that we searched out a first-edition copy of the book, put it back into print, and introduced thousands of other families to the story of David.

I mention Just David here because his literary life illustrates the concept of guarding a child’s heart. The story opens in a secluded mountain cabin where David’s father had moved with his son six years before with a very specific purpose in mind. Now David’s father knows he is dying and that David will need to go back to the world from which he had removed him. Though ill, he begins to walk David down the mountain path to the village below, wondering if what he has done in those six years will mean anything.

The rest of the book is about David’s new life in the village, with both beauty-deprived and beauty-filled townspeople who take him in after his father’s death. It’s about how David’s guarded heart prepared him for the new life and people he would encounter and how his innocence and goodness brought needed beauty and life to the world he found.

Just David is only a story, a novel written a century ago, and yet it touches on hopes that are perhaps particularly distinctive to Christian parents.

Do you have any friends living in your home, joining your family through the wonder of read-aloud stories? If not, consider adding a storytime to your family rhythms. I hope you’ll find a friend like David too.