Blessed Are the Pure in Heart, for They Will See God.

My boys are still at the age where the world is good.

They wave at strangers. They cry when a balloon floats away and laugh until they can't breathe at things that aren't even funny. When the oldest talks about God there's no hesitation in it, no argument, no proof required. He's just there, the way the sun is there.

I watch them and my chest aches, because I know what's coming.

One day, they'll read the news. One day, someone will be cruel to them for no reason at all. One day, they'll learn the words for the things that happen in this world, the wars the awful headlines and the quiet betrayals, and a little of the light will go out of their eyes.

I can't stop it. I can soften it, hold it back for a while, but I can't keep them innocent forever.

It isn't only what they might lose that worries me. It's who they might become.

I want them to grow into kind men, gentle with whatever is weak, men who respect women, who are good to strangers, who treat the earth and every living thing on it as something they were trusted with.

I want them to love the way Jesus loved. And I know the world will be pulling them in a hundred other directions while I try to teach them that.

"Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God."

I used to read that as a bar I would never clear. Lately, I read it as a promise, and as a comfort for exactly these fears.

Jesus said those words standing in an occupied country, to people who knew about cruelty and loss and corruption far better than my children ever will.

He wasn't blessing a sheltered innocence that had never met the world. He was blessing a heart kept clear toward God in the middle of all of it.

Pure in heart doesn't mean untouched by the world. It means undivided in spite of it.

That changes what I am actually afraid of. I thought their goodness depended on staying innocent, on never finding out how broken things really are.

But the people in that crowd had already found out how cruel the world is, and Jesus told them they could still see God. The clarity He blesses isn't the fragile kind that shatters the first time life gets hard. It's the kind He gives, and guards, and restores.

I can't shield my children from the world, and I am slowly learning I was never meant to. What I can do is the thing that matters more. I can entrust their hearts to the One who makes hearts pure.

The God who promises that the pure in heart will see Him is the same God watching over them in every room I am not in.

Their clarity and their kindness were never going to come from me keeping the world out. They come from Him.

Watching them is teaching me to want it again, too. Somewhere along the way I let my own heart get crowded and clouded, until God became something I had to squint to see.

Maybe you have felt that squinting too, the way the world can cloud your view until God feels far off and hard to find.

If so, this is your invitation: ask Him for a pure heart. Just like a child. It's part of the reason I always have children in my images.

Not a perfect one. You do not have to clean yourself up first, because He is the One who does the cleansing, and He gives clear eyes to anyone who asks.

Seek Him with your whole heart and watch the fog begin to lift, until you start seeing Him again, in people, in small ordinary moments, in the life right in front of you.

Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God. That promise has not closed. It is still for you, today.