When each human being is born, he has a "soft spot" on the top of his head, called the "fontanel." In due time, the bones of the skull come together, and the soft spot becomes hard.
Now, the name "fontanel" was not given to that spot by accident, even though the real meaning of the word is a closely held secret. It gives us answers to two of the hardest questions human beings have ever asked each other.
The "font" part comes from the Latin word "fons," which means "spring," like a spring of water. "Ab" is Latin for "from," and "El" is the ancient Hebrew name for God. But "fonsabel" sounds funny. It sounds like the name of a clown - sort of like Clarabelle! So the "s" was changed to a "t" and the "b" was changed to an "n." That makes "Fontanel." Fontanel really means "springs from God." And babies really do spring from God!
Lots of people don't know that - and that's why they keep asking themselves the first hard question, which is "Where do we come from?"
Now, as we get older, and the bones close over the fontanel, we get hardheaded. Sometimes we have to be hardheaded, because we don't want to let other people take advantage of us. But for most of human history, people were hardheaded all the time. They didn't know any other way to be.
Well, Jesus fixed all that. When Jesus sent the Holy Spirit to us, the Spirit moved the "spring from God" out of our heads and into our hearts, so that today, even if we are sometimes very hardheaded, we have all been made soft-hearted. And God left the fontanel on babies' head to help remind mothers that the babies come from Him.
But what do you think comes from this spring? If springs are in the ground, water comes from them. But our spring is in our hearts. Do we have any water in our hearts? No. Well, what do we keep in our hearts? Love! We have love pouring into our hearts all the time, hour after hour, day after day, month after month, all the years of our lives. God just keeps pouring it in all the time, even into people who think God doesn't exist and even into people we think are really bad folks. Why?
Well look: The spring on the mountain has water pouring out all the time. What happens to that water? It runs out all over the ground and waters every living thing it touches. All the trees and flowers grow taller and prettier, and the squirrels and rabbits and chipmunks have something to drink, and the mountain is all green and beautiful. And the spring waters even things that aren't living, like rocks, and makes them all shiny clean.
And that's exactly what happens with the spring of love in our hearts. It comes to us directly from God, and we get so full up with it that it just spills out all over everybody and everything. And then everybody and everything grows a little bit taller and a little bit prettier, and the world is a little bit more beautiful - all because we let some of our share of God's love get spilled on them.
Now, what happens to the land when somebody builds a dam around the spring? Above the dam, the land gets all flooded. The trees drown. The flowers drown. Even the rabbits and squirrels and chipmunks and everything else drowns, if they can't get away in time. The land gets all soggy and muddy and then it isn't any good to anybody. Below the dam, everything dries out and becomes all hard and brittle, like a desert. Plants and animals die of thirst, and everything becomes all dusty and dead. That land isn't much good to anybody either.
Well, if we build a dam around our hearts, and don't let out a lot of the love God keeps pouring into us, we'll get all soggy and muddy inside and not be any good to anybody either - not even to ourselves. And on the outside, we'll get cold and hard and start acting badly. What do you think they call people who do this to themselves?
Hardhearted.
Fortunately, even though we only have one place in our hearts through which God is forever pouring gallons and gallons of love, He gave us a whole bunch of ways to let it out. We have two ears to listen to people with, for example. We have two hands to help people with. We have great big smiles to help people feel God's love. And we have something even better: we have the secret.
Some people don't know that God is pouring all this love into them, and they don't know that they spring from God just like we do. So they don't know they are supposed to be letting God's love spill out of them, and they got all hardhearted without even realizing they were doing it.
But we know they spring from God, and we know they are full of God's love, even if they don't know it. So what we have to do with hardhearted people is listen to them extra hard, help them more than we help anybody else, and let just as much of God's love spill out of us onto them as we can. Maybe - just maybe, now - we can help God's love open up their hearts from the outside. And then they would be softhearted people like we are and would start letting God's love spill out of them, too. Then they would be able to stop making themselves and everybody around them unhappy.
Being nasty to people doesn't make them nicer, and in general, we only want to be around nice people. That means that when we let God's love spill out of us onto other people so they can stop being nasty, we're really doing it for ourselves. When people stop being nasty to us, we're a lot happier and our life is a lot easier. So that's the answer to the second hard question, which is "Why should I be nice to somebody who isn't nice to me?"
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