In our daily experiences with children, we discover they are most perceptive and often utter profound truths. Charles Dickens, the author of the classic A Christmas Carol, illustrated this fact when he described the humble Bob Cratchit family assembling for a rather meager but long-anticipated Christmas dinner. Bob, the father, was returning home with his frail son Tiny Tim upon his shoulder. Tiny Tim “bore a little crutch, and had his limbs supported by an iron frame.” Bob’s wife asked of him, “And how did little Tim behave?”

“‘As good as gold,’ said Bob, ‘and better. Somehow he gets thoughtful, sitting by himself so much, and thinks the strangest things you ever heard. He told me, coming home, that he hoped the people saw him in the church, because he was a cripple, and it might be pleasant to them to remember upon Christmas Day who made lame beggars walk, and blind men see.’” (Charles Dickens, Christmas Carol and Cricket on the Hearth, New York: Grosset and Dunlop, n.d., pp. 50–51.)

Charles Dickens himself said, “I love these little people, and it is not a slight thing when they who are so fresh from God love us.”