The Ignorance of Bliss...or Vice Versa?

There was a former student of mine who I admired greatly for her blissful ignorance to the world around her.  She was one of the happiest kids I have ever taught, and I chalked that up to her complete inability to see how she fit into the immediate world around her.  Because of that detachment, she never fell prey to the rumors, the gossip, the stress, and all the other day-to-day shenanigans of school life.  She was simply a "happy camper."  And I envied that.  I envied it because I saw how LIFE, in effect, beat down kids daily.  I saw how the stress of performing well in school and on the dreaded PSSAs sucked the enjoyment of growing up right out of the lungs and the souls of the kids.  I watched as betrayed friendships, nasty gossip, and verbal bashings beat away at the soft, fragile essence of the innocence of childhood.  Growing up, I realized, was a brutal affair.  Lost, the blissfulness of being ignorant to the ways of the world.  It's true, to a point at least, that ignorance is bliss! 
What is it about maturity and growing up that drags the soul of a person down into the abyss of uncertainty and  fear?  When and why do we get to a point where the infliction of comparing ourselves and our lives to that of others becomes a standard notion in day-to-day life?  When knowledge was of such a nature that we only needed to know the basics of life to keep us safe and secure in our immediate surroundings, life was uncomplicated and pure.  Blissful.  We were ignorant to the selfishness of the world.  Yes, we knew pain; but not the pain that comes from the heart.  Now I know the biology and physiology behind pain and know it truly doesn't come from the heart, but rather the mind.  Yet how many of us have felt heartache?  Pain that radiates from such severe emotional (and spiritual?) hurt that one can easily trace its origins to the bottom-most tip of his/her heart.  No, the pains we first knew were physical in nature.  They came from messages carried to the brain through the nervous system of  bodies to the brain so that could acknowledge the hurt.  The pain that comes from a burn, a cut, a brush burn, an illness, or even hunger-pangs.  These pains taught us about nature and about cause and effect:  touch a hot stove, you will get burned.  Fall off a bike, you will get cut.  Eat uncooked meat, well....good luck! 
We learned about the world but only within arms reach.  We remained ignorant to heartbreak.  To loss.  To jealousy.  To selfishness.  To discrimination.  To persecution.  To hate. 
But as we grew and expanded our reach so that our emotional fingertips stretched into the world, we started to come in contact with a terribly violent, unforgiving place.  We became aware. 
And awareness stole the ignorance of our youth away and replaced it with reality.  And that reality can be a scary, scary dimension. 
I have lived in this reality, this dimension, aware and cognizant of bad places this world has and holds, and I can become very resolute in my anger and hatred of it and towards it.  I suffer from these attacks partly for selfish reasons and partly because I know that every second of every day, another blissfully ignorant person is becoming aware.  And that saddens me.  Because that awareness can lead them to a hurt much more powerfully diabolical than any physical suffering.  Emotional pain is the worst kind of pain to know and experience.  It rattles all of your bones.  It exhausts all your energy and will to live.  It tears at logic and makes the illogical seem rational and sound.  It tempts you to become a shadow of what God designed you to be.  It coaxes you to hate, to envy, to lust, to lie, to short-cut, and to run astray from a life centered on God and His son.  It tells you to replace that unseen God with the tangible:  sex, cigarettes, alcohol, drugs, TV, sports, food, clothing, lavish spending, and all the other addictions one can possess that self-edifices, self-promotes, and self-indulges.  Gone is the blissful ignorance of simply knowing Love and trusting in that love to keep you safe and secure.  Gone is the blissful ignorance that precludes doubt and distrust and uncertainty.  And in its absence, the pain from despair and loneliness and a misdirected life slowly creeps into our hearts, pinning the love that once so filled it to the sides of membrane tissue-thin and corroded.
There is a solution to this loss of ignorance.  Some will say Awareness is the answer.  Awareness of one's place in God's kingdom.  Awareness of one's place in the entire scheme of life and life-eternal.  But I cannot be a card-carrying member of that club for I believe that although Awareness is important, it is what we do with that Awareness that supersedes the enlightenment thereof.  See, once we become Aware, I feel that we need to unlearn what the world tries to teach us about life with that Awareness, for if we leave it to stew and ruminate in our hearts and minds, it, like the evil Maleficent and her magic apple, will poison us down to our very souls.  No, Awareness, is not the answer.  Ignorance is.

1 John 5:18-20 says:   18We know that no one who is born of God sins; but He who was born of God keeps him, and the evil one does not touch him. 19We know that we are of God, and that the whole world lies in the power of the evil one. 20And we know that the Son of God has come, and has given us understanding so that we may know Him who is true; and we are in Him who is true, in His Son Jesus Christ.

Once we rekindle our relationship with God and His Son, ignorance to this world will bring us back to the original design God intended for us.  Awareness perverts our judgment because with it comes a second-guessing...do we believe the love and bliss we had in the ignorance of our childhood given to us almost like a pilot-light of love by God himself or do we accept the reality of the world we have come to know and accept as "educated", experienced adults?   I am not saying we need to walk through this world asleep or in that foggy state between awake and sleep.  No.  We cannot close our eyes to the suffering in this world, rather, we need to be an advocate for Christ.  We need to crave that once ignorant blissful way we learned to love and hope and dream unadulterated by the sins of this world.  And now, as those reborn in Christ, we have found a rebirth in the love of Christ, the hope of His second coming and our eternal life with Him, and the dream of bringing as many people to Him who has loved us, yes, even though we are sinners. 

Ignorance is not an excuse to be lazy.  It's not a justification to do stupid things or to live lives without regard to the consequences of our actions.  No, ignorance is not a lack of intelligence or knowledge either.   On the contrary.  Ignorance in its truest sense is the beauty found in the knowledge that comes from that purest relationship with God and His son; simple; unfiltered, uncensored, unclouded by the lies, tricks, doubts, and perversions of this world.  It calls us back to the most intimate of relationships with God, found at the foot of the cross with us looking up at our Savior who has died for us and He looking down on us with love.  And it's that love that is in our hearts when we accept Him as our Lord and Savior, and it's that love that is truly blissful.