A Dangerous Wonder

Friday night, August 29, 2008 [a beautiful night and 78 degrees],
Continuing the subject of wild abandon to Jesus, I offer the following excerpt from the late Mike Yaconnelli's book, "Dangerous Wonder," pages 53-54: Little children start their lives unrule-ly, without rules, oblivious to society’s prescribed laws, which, according to the rule makers of our society, exist for children’s and everyone’s good. Eventually children are socialized. Domesticated. They learn how to behave, how to conform to the cultural ‘norms’ for the greater good of society. Children are told that learning the rules, becoming responsible and orderly, and discovering the boundaries of a civilized world are what growing up is all about. But is it? Or, in the process of socializing our children to follow the rules, do we rob them of the discernment needed to know when to follow rules and when to break them? Have we robbed our children (including those of us who have grown out of childhood) of the childlike intuition that caused us to know in our hearts how to recognize the Rule Maker? Christianity is this wild religion that has always been more concerned about following Jesus than following the rules of Jesus. Remember when you said yes to Jesus that first time? You didn’t know all the rules, but you knew Jesus. Sadly, the church immediately stepped in and told us we needed to know more than Jesus; we needed to know the rules of the Christian faith, otherwise we might end up in confusion and spiritual anarchy. The church is always worried we might make a mistake! Mistakes are the guaranteed consequences of wild abandon. Mistakes are signs of growth, which is why the Old and New Testaments are filled with stories of people who made mistakes. The church should be the one place in our culture where mistakes are not only expected but also welcomed. Every time the disciples started establishing rules—no children near Jesus; don’t let the crowd touch Jesus; don’t talk to Samaritan women; don’t let people waste expensive perfumes—Jesus told them to knock it off, and His rebuke was usually followed by a lecture that said, ‘You still don’t get it! We are substituting religious rules with Me!’ Jesus kept saying, ‘Follow Me,’ not, ‘follow My rules.’ So most of us have spent our Christian lives learning what we can’t do instead of celebrating what we can do in Jesus. What a tragedy! What a misunderstanding of Jesus; He is the One who taught us how to break the rules.
Maybe this helps us understand why Jesus said, “Permit the children to come to Me; do not hinder them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these” (Mark 10:14). The truth is, Jesus is simply too bizarre, too radical, too dangerous for adults. There is no wonder that so many abandon Him. It is much more comfortable for them to abandon Him, than it is to abandon their religion. Interestingly, children have no religion to abandon until some adult brainwashes them into conforming to his/her idea of what religion should be.
I dare you to become like a child and live in wild abandon to Jesus!

Blessings,
Mac

PS: You should read Yaconnelli's book; it is excellent.