Kids know Jesus best

Sometimes, grownups make things harder than they are. If you get mad at somebody, you might yell or not play with them for a day; but then you both say you're sorry, and you're friends again. But when adults get mad at each other, some of them stop being friends!

Jesus liked the way kids do it better. In this week's Gospel (Matthew 11:25-30), He tells us why.

Jesus prayed, "I praise you, Father, because you've helped people understand my teachings if they listen like children. No one really knows me but you, and no one really knows you but me." Then He told the people, "Come to me if you've been struggling and you're tired, and I'll give you rest. Learn from me, because the work I give isn't such a burden."

Even the people that Jesus met acted like that sometimes. When He tried to teach them something like "love your neighbor," they wouldn't just listen to Him. They wanted to know who the neighbor was, why they had to love her and whether they could just love her sometimes!

That's why Jesus liked kids. Kids just listened to what He said, instead of trying to figure out why He said it and all sorts of other stuff.

Doing all that "figuring out" can make a grownup -- or a kid -- tired. Jesus had an idea for that: If you've been asking why something happened and you're sick of that, just pray to Him for a while. Jesus promised to "give you a rest" from the problem.

Some adults think things are hard when they're not. That was Jesus' last lesson in the Gospel story: that if we learn from Him, life will be a little easier, because Jesus' ideas about how to live are pretty easy to understand. Jesus' lessons were easy -- it's people that make them hard!

PRAYER FOR THE WEEK: Jesus, help me just listen to you. Amen!

(07-01-99)