Two Words

My brothers are a lot older than me. Eleven years. Eight years. Because of this fact, learning to play by myself was a necessity in my childhood. What can I say? I talked to a lot of imaginary people. Very frequently, however, amongst the hundreds upon thousands of art supplies, movies, and Barbie clothes, I would find myself uttering two words. These two words would strike instant rage into the eyes of my mother. To my mother, these two words triggered more exasperation and displeasure than all four-letter words combined. These two words were banned in my home; and, to this day, I cannot speak these two words without feeling the cringe of my mother’s face deep within my heart. “I’m bored.”… … “How can you be bored?!” she would say. Instant rage.

These two incredibly sagacious guys [‘sagacious’ means ‘intelligent’… excuse me, I just took the GRE], one who teaches at Duke and one who is equally as cool but I don’t know where he teaches, wrote this book awhile back about the Christian life. What do Christians look like? What do our churches look like? What should they look like? You ever sat in a church pew and rehearsed every item on your grocery/work/personal/weekly to-do list? Did that hour in the pew ever seem like four… or five? These two smart guys, in their book, wrote something that made me cringe deep within my heart. They said, “[Christians] shall die, not from crucifixion, but from sheer boredom.” So I ask...

Is Christianity boring?... I thought about asking, “Is Jesus boring?” but then I thought about him and his life and the stories we have, and Jesus is without a doubt NOT boring. He’s wild and crazy and radical and funny! The problem is, maybe no one sees that. Maybe we listen to Jesus’ words and hear nothing but a 98-year-old preacher’s voice on an uneventful Sunday morning, sitting in a hard wooden pew with unbelievably thin cushions. I guess we could blame this on the ministers, the preachers, who don’t tend to project a personality onto the bible when they teach it. An absolute shame, huh?

Long ago, people died. People always died. There was this valley, in fact, filled with their bones. Dry bones, really dead bones. The Lord God came to this prophet named Ezekiel and told him to speak to the bones [way weirder than speaking to imaginary people, btw]. When he did, guess what happened? They came ALIVE! That's right. These brittle, useless, lifeless bones grew flesh. [which is gross to imagine but miraculous nonetheless] All of a sudden they were transformed – living and breathing, with purpose. They were dead, really dead, and then they were alive. God just made them alive... again.

All that is to say…

WAKE UP, PEOPLE!!!

Following Jesus is meant to make you come ALIVE! MORE alive, in fact, than people who don't at all follow him - cuz God breathed into you TWICE!! Once to live and once more to LIVE! [See John 20… “And Jesus breathed on them…” See? Meaningful and yet bizarrely awkward and funny.]

We are part of something huge, this underground revolution of change and love and acceptance and justice and peace and grace; you are alive in order to set right the broken things. You are alive to remind the world of what was forgotten in that garden – that we don’t have to hide anymore, that God is all we need.

You are alive to give the world what it doesn’t know it needs the most [read that again, cuz it confused even me and I’m the one who wrote it].

Jesus is not boring, and following Jesus… wow, yeah, that’s not boring either. I hesitate saying this but if you are bored... maybe you’re doin’ it wrong. I mean, it’s not like there’s a lacking of stuff to be done here – lives to help, pain to mend, families to reconcile. Seriously, it's not like we've run out of things to do.

I want you to have a wild life, an adventurous one. A life that takes risks and jumps out of boxes and defies norms. That’s the kinda life Jesus had – and we’re called to follow him. So follow him… and may you walk in his wild and crazy footsteps. Wherever they lead you.