It's Time To Party

It's Time To Party (excerpts)
By Mike Yaconelli
May/June 1989

It doesn't take much to make most of us realize that we have become too serious,
too tense, too stressful. The result is that we have forgotten how to live life.
It seems like the older we get, the more difficult it is for us to enjoy living.

It reminds me of a description of life given by Rabbi Edward Cohn: "Life is
tough. It takes up a lot of your time, all your weekends, and what do you get in
the end of it?"

I think that the life cycle is all backward. You should die first, get it out of
the way. Then you live twenty years in an old-age home. You get kicked out when
you're too young. You get a gold watch, you go to work. You work forty years
until you're young enough to enjoy your retirement. You go to college; you party
until you're ready for high school; you go to grade school; you become a little
kid; you play. You have no responsibilities. You become a little baby; you go
back into the womb; you spend your last months floating; and you finish up as a
gleam in somebody's eye.

It's hard to imagine we were a gleam in someone's eye once. What happened to the
gleam in our eye? What happened to that joyful, crazy, spontaneous, fun-loving
spirit we once had? The childlikeness in all of us gets snuffed out over the
years...

..The sign that Jesus is in our hearts, the evidence of the truth of the gospel
is ... we still have a light on in our souls. We still have a gleam in our eye.
We are alive, never boring, always playful, exhibiting in our everydayness the
"spunk" of the spirit. The light in our souls is not some pietistic somberness,
it is the spontaneous, unpredictable love of life...I believe it's time for the
party to begin.