Childlike faith and and coming to faith as a child are both good things. But to communicate to others about it… like anything else, why should it be easy? This later becomes a barrier to coming to faith as an adult.
Religious vocabulary is demanding, and words such as sin and repentance carry so much baggage that even many Christians are reluctant to employ them. In a culture marked by theological illiteracy it is tempting to censor terms that are so often misconstrued and misused. Many people who would not dream of relying on the understanding of literature or the sciences they acquired as children are content to leave their juvenile theological convictions largely unexamined. If they resented religion when they were young, as adults they are perplexed and dismayed by its stubborn persistence in the human race. But religions endure because they concern themselves with our deepest questions about good and evil, about the suffering that life brings to each of us, and about what it means to be fully human in the face of death.
-Kathleen Norris, Acedia & Me, p.114