the best theorists

"for the Kingdom of God belongs to those who are like these children.  I tell you the truth, anyone who doesn't receive the Kingdom of God like child will never enter it."

{mark 10:15, NLT}

everyone enters the kingdom as a child. we are born royal infants into this regal reign.  born again.  anew. fresh. empty. unwritten. pure as a tiny pink newborn. this kingdom, this reign is like nothing we have ever had the capacity to experience, hear or see before.  completely contrary to our aged imaginations.  and then there is our aged imaginations.  our newborn spirits starkly contrast our old, unregenerate soul in this strange new kingdom life.  minds full of the world we knew.  full of ideas & boundries & limits.  full of memories & information & "fact".  full of all we thought trustworthy.  all we previously learned & relied on to keep us safe, alive & well.  but the kingdom changes things.  changes everything.  changes our perspective, our framework, our paradigm.  it radicalizes everything it touches.  but it's that old soul, our mind, will & emotion, that trips us up like a bad case of deja vu.  must be saddled, taken captive, submitted to a daily, moment-by-moment scrubbing, regenerating, recreating.

"do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind..."

{romans 12:2, NIV}

and so it is with old soul & newborn spirit.  a constant tension & turning over.  but then there is when new soul meets new spirit in a child.  and it is children who make the best kingdom dwellers.  the best theorists.

"children make the best theorists since they have not yet been educated into accepting our routine social practices as 'natural', and so insist in posing to those practices the most embarrassingly general and fundamental questions, regarding them with such wondering engagement, which we adults have long forgotten.  since they do not yet grasp our social practices as inevitable, they do not see why we might not do things differently."

{terry eagleton, "theory as liberatory practice"}

the kingdom belongs to children.  no one can enter the kingdom unless a child.  a child, with all wondering engagement, with their unravelling questions, their lack of education & learnedness, their overactive, innocent imaginations, their unawareness of cultural frameworks & their overwhelming simplicity.  a child. and be you 21, 65, 88 or 92, it is never to late to be a child.  never to late for your childhood to begin...