Last week, the internet nearly caved in on itself when a happy toddler in white glasses and a yellow sweater danced her way into her father’s live interview on a BBC news program. If you have not seen the video I’m talking about, watch it here. Trying to describe it would be like trying to describe DaVinci’s Mona Lisa or Michelangelo’s David. It’s best just to see it for yourself.
Once you’ve watched these glorious 47 seconds a dozen times or so, you might want to read this hilarious play-by-play from The Telegraph. Also, it seems mom’s pants might not have been on all the way.
The BBC did a follow-up interview with the family in the video, and it will make you love them even more. They are just people—a humble, funny, intelligent couple raising little children who could not care less about the BBC, politics in South Korea, or how important dad’s job is. For the children in the video, those things might as well not even exist. All they see is dad, and all they want is a piece of his attention. And you can see it on the dad’s face that he wants to give it, even as he and his wife valiantly try to recover the moment so he can finish his thought on live television about the political climate of East Asia.
A while back, Tim Keller wrote, “The only person who dares wake up a king at 3:00 AM for a glass of water is a child.”
This video is a picture of that. For the dad, access to being on live TV required a lot—years of school, practice talking on camera, and immersion in culture and politics. For the children, on the other hand, access to their father is no trouble at all. They just dance right in.
And we love it. We love it because we can relate to the parents and because we want to be the kids.
Thanks to the technological age we’re in, within days of this interview someone created this gif of those children, and now it seems to be showing up everywhere as a universal expression of celebration and approval. In my opinion, this is a perfect example of creating art to the glory of God. Someone used their gifts to make a sharable gif which celebrates innocence and joy even as it pokes fun at the absurdity and futility of our attempts to keep things together.
And here’s the most beautiful part. Those kids still have no idea the joy they’ve brought the watching world. Why? Because to them, we might as well not even exist. To them, only four people witnessed that moment. To them, it all happened at home, and it was all okay. Why wouldn’t it be?