When Elf on the Shelf first came out, I was a part of the “I’m not going to do that with my children” crowd. There was just something that felt manipulative about an elf appearing between Thanksgiving and Christmas to narc on you to Santa.

As I type this, I’m looking right at Pepper(mint) and Elfie, who are currently paragliding in from one of our kitchen lights holding two balloons that spell out “6-7” (don’t ask me what that means).

You see, somewhere along the way we decided that the wonder of Christmas was worth the daily reminders on my phone to “move the elf,” as our children have awoken every morning to find the hidden elves who had moved overnight and gotten into some sort of elf mischief (just look at their faces, you know they’re hiding something). The gleam in our kids’ eyes as they seek and find them is brilliant and magical.

Now, no offense to the families with “narc” elves, but ours do not report bad behavior back to Santa. They were simply sent by Santa to bring joy and a little mischievousness into our Christmas season. Our kids do not see them as little security cameras recording their every move. Instead, they just enjoy another part of what makes the season of light a little more joyful for them.

In Matthew 18, Jesus instructs his disciples to “change and become like little children” if we want to seek, find, and enter the kingdom of heaven. Many have rewritten this to say that Christians should have a “childlike faith.” Either way, what it means is that our faith and searching for Christ’s presence will require the wonder, excitement, and joy of my children searching for two elves that teleport to and from the North Pole each year. Faith that sits beside the stress, pain, and darkness of the world around them with full abandon so that they might believe in something that does not make sense without doing so.

At some point, life gets too hard, too complex, and too dark for us as adults. Unlike Peter Pan, who didn’t ever want to grow up so that he could always remain a child, we let go of such dreams so that we can climb the “ladders” of our world in order to achieve some form of worthiness. When does this desire begin? I can’t say completely. However, for many of us, I know it began somewhere in the hazy season between childlike wonder and twenty-four-seven news cycles.

This Advent, I wonder what it looks like to search for the Pepper and Elfies of our own adult lives. What would it mean to begin each day with the goal of pursuing something that fills our world with brilliance and brightness? What would it mean to have the faith of children, like my own, who awake with the excitement that something almost magical has happened in the dark of the night that will bring them joy?

Maybe that is the invitation of Advent for us this year. Not to ignore the grief or the headlines, not to pretend the world is lighter than it is, but to practice a kind of holy searching that keeps our hearts open. To look for signs of joy tucked into the corners of our days, even the ordinary ones. To trust that God is still slipping grace into our stories when we are not looking, still showing up in small, surprising ways that ask us to lean in with curiosity.

Pepper and Elfie may only be bits of felt, cotton, and plastic, but they remind our family that wonder is worth making room for. And maybe that is what Christ hopes to remind us all of too, that the light often comes quietly, that the good news often arrives disguised as something simple, and that the kingdom becomes clearer when we are willing to see the world, even for a moment, through childlike eyes.

So this Advent, may we choose to look. May we choose to expect joy. May we wake each morning ready to find grace hiding in plain sight, shimmering with the possibility that God has already been at work while we slept.