Cloneliness is Next to Godliness, Right? ;)

I've posted the video below (Steve Taylor - I Want To Be A Clone) in the past and I thought I'd post it here again.

This song reminded me of some other notes that I'd taken recently, but had lost - and then found again - that had to do with my recent Wild Thing series.  Actually, I thought my wife had conveniently, I mean, 'accidentally' lost those notes of mine, since they contained stuff about her (see the first two posts).  :)  Ok, I'm just kidding!  I knew I had put them somewhere but I couldn't remember where.  Anyway, when I found them, I had already posted the final part of that series so I decided to just drop it all.

But now with the notes resurrected, and this video fresh in my mind, why not write some more!  The bottom line of the Wild Thing series was essentially "be the 'wild,' unfettered person who God created you to be."  Don't let rules and laws - which you were never meant to live by in the first place - "tame" you and keep you from being the "wild" (natural) person that God wired you to be.  Don't get me wrong - I do think there's a place for practical guidelines and such in life.  But I don't believe they were ever meant to be the basis of daily living in Christ.  HE HIMSELF is the basis of our entire life in Him!  And He is enough.

I Want To Be A Clone is a tongue-in-cheek song about a person learning the ways of the Christian life such as "Christianese" and going down the "assembly line" of his church, and not rocking the boat.  You know, just doing what other Christians say and do - being a clone.  Of course that's not what we were created to be!  We weren't individually created to be clones of other Christians, and we weren't even created to be clones of Christ.  Didn't He tell His disciples that they'd do the same things He did... and even greater things?  If they had stuck with only the things they'd seen Him do, they never would've seen that in the present day, there are all kinds of new things just waiting to happen, daily.

I'm not meant to replicate what Jesus did in the Bible.  I'm not even meant to replicate what I did last week or last month or last year!  As much as I may have been led to do those things, and as much as Christ's life might have been in those things, today is a new day and has its own new things.  Pastors, teachers, leaders, mentors - they're not meant to get others to replicate what Jesus did.  They're not meant to get others to replicate what they do.  As a body, we're not meant to go around trying to clone each other or to clone past experiences.

I remember one time a few years ago when my son Jared asked me, "What does Mini Me mean?"  The reason he wondered was because he had heard countless people calling him "Mini Me" when they saw him and me together.  He got really blessed with his father's looks... haha!  When my daughter Noelle was younger, she was looking at pictures on my parents' hallway wall, and when she saw a picture of me as a young boy, she thought it was her brother.  But looks can be very deceiving.  Or let me put it this way - you can't judge a book by its cover.  Or said even another way - from now on we regard no one according to outward appearances.

As Jared has grown, it's been obvious that his likes, dislikes, gifts and talents, desires, callings, etc, are so very different than mine have ever been.  In some ways, we're alike, but in many ways we're not.  The worst thing I could do to him as I raise him would be to try to get him to be a clone of me.  Now be quiet; I hear all the amen's out there!  "One" of me is enough, I hear you collectively say!  And you're right.  Thank God there's only one of me!

My "job" as a parent is to help him discern who he really is, and to guide him to be that person.  "The apple doesn't fall far from the tree" may indeed sometimes be the case.  But he's got to grow up and be his own tree.  And so it is with all of us.  "Who I am" and "who you are" may very well work together in life, and as Paul said, we are "individually members of one another."  But that doesn't mean we're the same.  We've got to give one another the freedom to be who they are, and even encourage one another in who they are without trying to make them be like us!  There's nothing wrong with influencing one another with who we are, but in the end God's got a great big, inexhaustible paint palette, with which He never creates clones!