Lurching on toward the kingdom, I decided. Staggering drunkenly toward the kingdom, the way every good church must because, while bringing in the kingdom of God is the business of the Church, we never get it right. We lurch, we stagger, we fall, we rise, we resist, we refuse, we fail, we fall, we rise, we fall, we rise. Bad planning on God's part, if you ask me, making human beings responsible, but there it is: the pattern abides.
From Mary Cartledgehayes, the book is called Grace and it's amazing and breathtaking and totally awesome in every way.
A bit of commentary here: I totally trust God with this. I mean, it is crazy to leave the spreading of the Gospel to us disciples. He did that you know, quite explicitly in the Bible. "Go into all the world..." he said. But but but He did send along the Holy Spirit, and Jesus is pretty explicit about the role of the Third Person of the Trinity. The best of that is in John. So while we stumble and bumble, and argue with each other about just about everything there is to argue about, we are still charged to be first, living out God's grace and love in front of everyone else and second, to be the hands and feet of God in the world--Him providing the brains for the effort and us the labor.
We do come off looking really goofy a lot of the time though.
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