Picture Perfect

So I was talking with a table of junior high boys in sunday school this morning and after a certain point in conversation, the whole scene struck me as perfect. You know how you get those feelings at certain moments in your life where everything seems as it should be? A glimpse of heaven sort of, where it seems like God has completely saturated every aspect of that moment. They are you usually pretty fleeting, but often leave lasting impressions.
I'm confident that I socialize better with kids than I do with adults. Especially kids who aren't at the stage where they are too cool be a kid. Maybe it's because something inside of me misses that part of childhood... I don't know. For instance, last week I went to this movie that was showing a bar in town. I was this super retro, from the 60's, movie about Choinard (the guy who started Patagonia company) and some buddies climbing in Patagonia. I walked in and the place was packed. I generally don't go to bars, I don't do the whole bar talk thing very well. I have a hard time standing around BS-ing with people that you're yelling at to hear over the din and loud music. So walked in and I looked out back and there's a bunch of little kids having a snowball fight. I'd rather join them than try to play the bar scene. And I did. It was fun.
Like I said I was talking to table of junior high kids this morning about Jesus. And partly why it seemed all perfect was because they were being so... them. In response to a question or whatever subject was at hand, often they would blurt out something seemingly unrelated. They weren't doing it to be annoying or disruptive, but that's what was going through their heads. Even now, in my day to day conversation, someone will say something that inside my head triggers some story, or factoid that's totally unrelated to the converstaion and my mind goes off on this tangent until I realize that I missed the last half of whatever that person said cause I was busy chasing this rabbit in my head. Naturally I pretend that it never happened and that I am totally following what my counterpart is saying to avoid looking like a fool. How rad is it that these kids were verbally processing their thoughts with me, no matter how off topic it might be.
The overarching lesson of the day was "who is Jesus?" and somewhere along the line, one of these kids' mental spinoffs prompted him to ask the rest of the group if we had ever seen Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. He proceeded to recount the scene in the grail room with all the grails encrusted in gold and jewels and the true grail being simple and wooden. At that point it hit me just how perfect our story is. Our relationship with God has been called "the greatest story ever told" and I never really think about it, but it is so amazingly perfect. Every aspect of life in this story fits together perfectly down to the tiniest detail.
The idea of God coming to earth to save his creation in itself is genius. But the raw power, wrath and love og God entering a baby born to a poverty stricken couple in backwoods podunk town. In a place where all the distractions, wealth, power, everything was absent and it was just God slipping in the back door to save humanity. The whole story is so unimagineable and at the same time so perfect it has to be real. You can't make that stuff up.
Those times when all is as it should be, I think are flickers of God's kingdom here on earth. A small snippit of how it will be when his kingdom comes for good. And the more I understand each year of God's ridiculous plot to save the world, the more each year I get stoked for Christmas, to celebrate the turning point in the story.