I remember my senior year of high school. It was in the spring, and we were staring into the face of the future, graduation on the near horizon—which, as I said last week, was a pretty anxiety-producing eventuality. So, a bunch of us decided one particular Friday to pitch tents on the front lawn of the high school and camp out. I don’t know. There were probably forty of us doing whatever goofy things 18-year-old kids do when they get a little taste of freedom mixed with a dash of rebellion.

My brother and his friends, who were all sophomores, thought they’d have a little fun at our expense. So, unbeknownst to us, 10 or 11 of them went around behind the school, climbed up, and got on the roof. They brought along a bunch of water balloons and what we called a “funnelator,”—which consisted of two bicycle tire inner tubes tied on either side to a giant funnel.

You’d put a water balloon in the funnel and have two guys each hold one end of their inner tubes, while a third guy would take the funnel and the water balloon and start walking backward—like a really big slingshot. And if everyone were strong enough, you could stretch that thing a long way, and it’d shoot a water balloon a pretty fair distance.

So, my brother and his friends were getting ready to rain on our little parade—so to speak. And just as they were going to let loose, a police car showed up behind the school and flashed its lights.

To this day, I don’t know why they didn’t just run. I mean, surely, if they’d all just split up, most of them could have gotten away without getting caught. But they dropped the funnelator and stood on the roof's edge looking down, like sheep peering into some great chasm.

Officer Colvin rounded them all up and took them to jail.

Yeah, jail. I know, right?

Which was pretty much the response when my dad got a phone call from the Grandville police department, telling him he could come down to the station to bail out his sixteen-year-old future minister son.

So, my dad got in the car. But instead of going straight to the police station, he came to the high school and picked me up.

I was surprised to see him since I had no idea that my brother and his friends had even been at the high school—much less arrested on aggravated-water-balloon charges.

I’m not sure why he thought I should be there for the shaming of my juvenile delinquent brother. On the other hand, maybe he was trying to make a point with me to think seriously about my future and the possible harm I could do to it if I ever got off the straight and narrow and started hanging out with people of questionable character embracing membership in some kind of rogue water balloon gang roaming the mean streets of Grandville, Michigan: “Take a good look. This is where messing around with bicycle inner tubes and funnels ultimately leads.”

Maybe he was trying to make a point for my brother, Daren: “See this, even your idiot big brother—who’s never really demonstrated a great deal of good sense—knows better than this. We had all our hopes pinned on you, and now this. Your mother and I are so disappointed in you.”

Or maybe he just thought that the Penwell family had experienced enough excitement for one night, and all he wanted to do was get everyone back under the same roof so he could go to bed in peace.

Well, we bailed him out, saving him from a frightful stretch of hard time in the big house, and took him home. But our family still bears the social stigma of harboring a water balloon terrorist among our ranks.

It’s tough growing up. Doing, saying things that probably aren’t the wisest choices.

One of the most important things about growing up is learning how to make good choices. According to modern neuroscience, we now know that the area of the brain that handles executive function—things like planning, organization, mood modulation, and judgment—are undergoing significant change in adolescents as their brains develop.

The little person in their heads that … you know, the wrinkled fussbudget who always seems to be throat-clearing and ahem-ing in an attempt to point out that maybe becoming water balloon terrorists is a dead-end road that will lead you to a life spent in the captivating company of guys with face tattoos and names like Mouse and Ice Box.

So, often, making good choices is precisely what teenagers are incapable of doing. But it’s the way things are. Sleeping into the afternoon, mood swings, and haircuts their kids will mock them for in twenty years—it’s the way they’re built.

Part of how we define adulthood, in fact, is reaching that point in life where the prefrontal cortex finally crosses the threshold where making good choices is the norm and not just an occasional lucky occurrence.

So, you’d think Jesus—now in his thirties in our text—would be better at it than he apparently is. People have undoubtedly told him his whole life whom he’s supposed to hang out with and whom he’s supposed to avoid. But he’s just not very adept at making good choices.