the    sides

The courtyard looked no longer like a museum; it looked more like a zoo.

You know what I am going to start praying for us at Grace Student Ministry? That we start looking like a zoo. Let me finish the scene out and I think you’ll get what I mean…

The quote is from C. S. Lewis’ The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe. The White Witch had turned many of the inhabitants of Narnia into stone. She had managed for years to hold Narnia a state of “always winter, never Christmas.” Then Aslan shows up. The great Lion, the Christ figure in C.S. Lewis’ epic stories.

He (Aslan) breathes on the stone statues and something absolutely ridiculous happens.

Creatures were running after Aslan and dancing round him till he was almost hidden in the crowd. Instead of all that deadly white the courtyard was now a blaze of colors; glossy chestnut sides of centaurs, indigo horns of unicorns, dazzling plumage of birds, reddy brown of foxes…

And instead of deadly silence the whole place rang with the sound of happy roarings, brayings, yelpings, barkings, squealings, cooings, neighings, stampings, shouts, hurrahs, songs and laughter.

This is the best description of what SHOULD happen when someone meets Jesus. They should explode into the true them - with richer colors and deeper sounds than before they met Jesus. Isn’t that what spiritual transformation is about? Allowing Jesus to change us - from the inside out - into the TRUE US He wants us to be?

So then the Church should be the Zoo that we all play and worship in together?

As leaders - let’s not make anymore statutes. Let’s let Jesus loose and see what kind of zoo he builds.