Today I am convicted.
"The person who's in love with their vision of community, will destroy community. But the person who loves the people around them will create community wherever they go." -Dietrich Bonhoeffer
I struggle to love Christians.
My closest friends know well, that this fatal flaw in me is deep and strong.
I'm enchanted with the prospect of a church that accepts, loves, forgives, and encourages the under-dog. But this is the very thing I fail to do for others...and the very thing that prevents me from experiencing what I hope for.
May I become someone who loves those around me...all of those around me.
i like you.
ReplyDelete:) I love you, flaws and all! Just so you know, they are not fatal because God's grace covers them. HE gives us grace and mercy to keep trying:)
ReplyDelete~Jenny
Wow! I read this post over and over. It is so true and so convicting. Thanks for sharing this. -Hannah
ReplyDeleteBoenhoeffer seems to have been no different in the struggle to love Christians.
ReplyDeleteI often ask myself why a "Christian instinct" often draws me more to the religionless people than to the religious, by which I don’t in the least mean with any evangelizing intention, but, I might almost say, "in brotherhood". While I am often reluctant to mention God by name to religious people—because that name somehow seems to me here not to ring true, and I feel myself to be slightly dishonest (it’s particularly bad when others start to talk in religious jargon; I then dry up almost completely and feel awkward and uncomfortable) to people with no religion I can on occasion mention him by name quite calmly and as a matter of course. Religious people speak of God when human knowledge (perhaps simply because they are too lazy to think) has come to an end, or when human resources fail -- in fact it is always the deus ex machina that they bring on to the scene, either for the apparent solution of insoluble problems, or as strength in human failure -- always, that is to say, exploiting human weakness or human boundaries.
In Christ we are offered the possibility of partaking in the reality of God and in the reality of the world, but not in the one without the other. The reality of God discloses itself only by setting me entirely in the reality of the world, and when I encounter the reality of the world it is always already sustained, accepted and reconciled in the reality of God.
~B