I was watching a TED video the other day and the speaker was talking about how our educational system strips away creativity and basically prepares kids to become college professors. Ever notice how public school curricula always have a hierarchy of subjects, with Math, Language, Science, etc. at the top and Art, Music, etc. at the bottom? The bottom tier, of course, is what usually goes first when budget cuts come along, but even before that, the creative skills are much less valued than the “core” stuff. And this, the speaker said, is true in just about every country around the world.

The speaker mentioned that he once lived in Stratford-on-Avon in England – where William Shakespeare lived. Actually, he resided in the next town over which was where Shakespeare’s father was born. He chuckled over the fact that we don’t usually think of Shakespeare having a father – or of being a boy – say a boy of 7 sitting in school and having an English teacher. What would have happened if the teacher had said, “William stop writing like that!!”?

And that got me thinking about Jesus.

At 7.

What if Jesus’ parents, rabbis, and other elders had forced him to conform to the conventional wisdom of the day – despising Samaritans, not speaking to women, walking past crippled people on the Sabbath, avoiding lepers, prostitutes, tax collectors and sinners? I mean, what if they had shoehorned Jesus into the top-tier Math, Language, etc. of the day (that’s a metaphor for the religious values in 1st century Palestine) instead of letting him develop his own creativity and all the unconventional ideas, concepts and talents that flowed from it?

Probably not the Jesus we know.

Maybe it’s time to celebrate and embrace creativity as a central part of the God-image with which we are all born. God the Creator has gifted us with a spirit of creativity that – when unleashed, developed and exercised – has the potential to bring fresh breezes to the stale old wind of religion.

Maybe it’s time to encourage our kids, our friends, our churches, and most especially ourselves to just “go for it!” Try out new ways of loving, new ways of being, new ways of exploring the universe, new ways of serving humankind. Set your creative self free. Go and dance, paint, sing, compose instead of calculating success that isn’t really success but just more of the same-old, same-old crap that makes the world so dull and lifeless.

Maybe it’s time to grow down – grow younger – and become more like Jesus.

At 7!