Walking by a pet shop on his way to school, a young boy stopped and stared through the window. Inside were four black puppies playing together. After school he ran home and pleaded with his mother to let him have one of the puppies. "I'll take care of it, Mom, I will. If you can just give me an advance on my allowance, I'll have enough money to buy one with my own money. Please, Mom, please."

The mother, knowing full well the complications having a new puppy would bring to a busy household, could not resist her son. "Okay, you can get the puppy, but I will expect you to take care of it."

"Yes, Mom, I will." Filled with excitement, the little boy ran to the pet shop to buy his new puppy.

After determining that the boy had enough money, the pet shop owner brought him to the window to choose his puppy. After a few minutes, the young boy said, "Um . . . I'll take the little one in the corner."

"Oh no," said the shop owner, "not that one; he's crippled. Notice how he just sits there; something is wrong with one of his legs, so he can't run and play like the rest of the puppies. Choose another one."

Without saying a word, the boy reached down, lifted his pant leg to expose a chrome leg brace to the owner.

"No," he said firmly, "I think I'll take the puppy in the corner."

It turned out that what disqualified the puppy from being chosen by others is what most qualified him to be chosen by the little boy.

It's amazing how few of us believe in the unqualified grace of God. Oh, yes, God loves us, as long as we're clean and whole and fixed. But it turns out that what disqualifies you and me from "spirituality" -- the mess of our lives and our crippledness -- is what most qualifies us to be chosen by Jesus.

THE MYTH OF FIXING OURSELVES

For a period of time, we were lucky enough to have a housekeeper. She would come in once a week to dust, vacuum, and clean every little out-of-the-way corner of our house. I dreaded the day she came, because my wife and I would spend all morning cleaning the house for the housekeeper! We didn't want the house to be dirty, or what would the housekeeper think?

We act the same way with God. We talk our way out of the spiritual life by refusing to come to God as we are. Instead, we decide to wait until we are ready to come to God as we aren't. We decide that the way we lived yesterday, last week, or last year makes us "damaged goods" and that until we start living "right," we're not "God material." Some of us actually believe that until we choose the correct way to live, we aren't chooseable, that until we clean up the mess, Jesus won't have anything to do with us. The opposite is true. Until we admit we are a mess, Jesus won't have anything to do with us. Once we admit how unlovely we are, how unattractive we are, how lost we are, Jesus shows up unexpectedly. According to the New Testament, Jesus is attracted to the unattractive. He prefers the lost ones over the found ones, the losers over the winners, the broken instead of the whole, the messy instead of the unmessy, the crippled instead of the noncrippled.

DANCING THE UNDANCEABLE

Lost in my thoughts, I was sitting in a hotel ballroom with fifteen hundred college students participating in a weekend faith conference. On the last day of the conference, with school starting the following Monday, the students made it clear they wanted to prolong the conference as long as possible. They wanted to party, to dance the afternoon away, to celebrate the Lord of the dance -- to resist going back into the busyness and demands of college life. The morning general session turned into a spontaneous celebration. Young men and women raised their hands, stood on chairs, shouted, cried, and laughed, and then suddenly a conga line broke out. Within seconds, hundreds of college students were weaving in and out of the room in long, raucous lines praising their God.

An older man with cerebral palsy sat in a motorized wheelchair, watching everyone else party. (He wasn't a college student. Technically he wasn't even supposed to be at the conference.) I was seated next to him, watching the students celebrate, when suddenly the wheelchair lunged into the celebration. The man's arms waved, his chair careened around the room with a jerky, captivating motion, his mouth struggled open and shut making incomprehensible sounds. Somehow a man who couldn't dance had become part of the graceful dancing of the crowd. Without warning, his motorized wheelchair lurched to the base of the stage, racing back and forth through a series of figure eights, twirls, and circles. He was laughing, lost in the joy of the Lord. His joy had taken a cold, ugly piece of motorized machinery and transformed it into an extension of his unconfined worship. He and his wheelchair had become one, a dancing, living thing. This man with a crippled body found a way to dance the undanceable.

I envy him. I want my crippled soul to escape the cold and sterile spirituality of a religion where only the perfect nondisabled get in. I want to lurch forward to Jesus, where the unwelcome receive welcome and the unqualified get qualified. I want to hear Jesus tell me I can dance when everyone else says I can't. I want to hear Jesus walk over and whisper to this disabled, messy Christian, "Do you want to dance?"

**

Mike Yaconelli was the co-founder of Youth Specialties. He spent 43 years of his life in ministry to youth, and 20 years as a pastor of a small church in Yreka, California (Mike called it "the slowest growing church in America"). Mike was also the author of "Dangerous Wonder: The Adventure of Childlike Faith."
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