After I preached to bunches of youth leaders in Orlando at Universal Studios, Brent Crowe (one of Jay Strack’s top leaders) was walking us back to our car when he pointed out to me and my boy Jeremy that there was a comet soaring way above us. I had never seen anything so brilliant in the night sky. You could see the tail of the comet clearly without the aid of binoculars. It really looked like, well, a comet. It was awesome.
Jeremy thought it was awesome too, so awesome in fact that he wanted to tell everyone on the way out of the park, “My daddy and I saw a comet!” It made me laugh when my boy ran up and yelled out to an unsuspecting guy, “MY DADDY AND I JUST SAW A COMET!” and ran off. The poor guy gave one of those uncomfortable half smiles, nodded and walked faster to get away from my hyper, happy, wild-eyed kid.
Kids are awesome. They get good news of any kind (“I just turned 4!” or “I found gum!” or “I saw a comet!”) and they want to share it with someone else.
Maybe that’s one of the reasons Jesus calls us to be like little children. When kids get good news they don’t appoint a subcommittee to analyze how open a particular demographic would be to hearing that good news. They don’t do a monster.com search for the best person to share the good news. They don’t even know what it means to attach a viable budget that will see the “sharing the good news” project through to completion.
No, when little children hear good news they just share it.
So let’s take a cue from the little ones. Let’s share the most awesome news in the universe with those around us. With childlike innocence let’s bring it up to our friends, neighbors, family, classmates, teammates, co-workers, whoever, whenever, wherever…let’s just do it. Sure we want to be wise, compassionate and strategic, but we don’t want to use that as an excuse not to bring it up. Let’s be like little children and share the good news with the joy of a child in our hearts and a great big smile on our faces!
Jeremy and I are off to Seaworld today. Who knows what sermon illustrations I’ll get? Hopefully I won’t hear the words, “Hey my daddy just lost his arm feeding the shark a corndog!”
