Child's Play

A thought dawned upon me. Children are accepting of almost everything. They will accept happiness, love, new people, new challenges, discipline, sadness, fun, and they will accept lessons that they have learned. If a mother tells her son to NOT put his hand on the stove, because it's hot, the son, will of course, put his hand on the stove. In return, his hand will get burned and he's learned that it's wrong and it won't happen again.
I started to wonder about how willing, young children, five years of age, could be so accepting of so many things. And then I thought about how God wants us to become like children through Christ and freely give and receive God's love and the love of others. After thinking this over, I wondered why it was so difficult to teenagers and adults to do exactly that: accept people for who they are, accept challenges that come into their lives, accept things in general.
I think a huge part of this not accepting things or people, for teenagers especially, is because all of us have the tendency to judge, even when we aren't thinking about it. Maybe someone looks funny, or acts weird, maybe you've heard strange stories about someone...but why should that mean you shouldn't get to know them for yourself?
Matthew 18:3-4 and said, "Truly, I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven." God wants us to be like children, children who can receive the love from Him freely and give, the same way God does, freely.
For me, this was kind of hard to grasp. I mean, we go our whole lives, trying to mature and learn all these new things so that we can 'learn to prosper' in the 'real world' that lays ahead of us. We learn to act like adults, to interact with adults, to do adult things. But, God wants us to act like children? It just...seemed kind of strange.

At church on Saturday, during worship, I got to see what God meant when He wanted us to act like children. There was a young boy, jumping around on the front of the stage, going crazy. He was yelling at the top of his lungs the love that he holds for Christ, he was dancing uncontrollably, and waving his arms all over the place. It was probably one of the most adorable things I had ever seen...and then it clicked. God doesn't want us to worry about what others think about us, He doesn't want us to judge others by the way they look or the way they might seem to act. I remember in elementary school, it didn't matter who you were, you always had friends. Now a days, it doesn't seem like that so much anymore.
God wants us to be like children. He wants us to jump up and down, wave our arms around, shout at the top of our lungs. He wants us to be able to love Him and everyone else in this world uncontrollably and without hesitancy. He wants us to freely receive and freely give to others (we learned how to share in Kindergarten, remember?). He wants us to have so much passion for Him that we can't handle it by ourselves, so we have to spread it to all the other children of God. How amazing is that?