Beautiful Ruggedness
Ch. 7- Growth in love, pg. 93
“Love can go in little ways, but also our withholding of ourselves is often beyond our knowing. You cannot surrender to God a self you do not know. This was surely also in the design of community: that we might find ourselves in the mirror of that community. It was as we shared the common life that one unredeemed area after another came to light. The joy of involvement was interwoven with the pain of it. Raw edges rubbed against raw edges.
We know about love in this fellowship because here we find it embodied in a way that we have not experienced in other places. Here, when there is a need, there is always a person to symbolize the God who is ever present”
It is so incredibly beautiful to read about a community in which this is a reality as well. We find here that looking into this community is much like looking into a mirror simply because we do not know what it is like to experience ourselves. It is as though once we have thrown into community, we are able to release ourselves that much more completely to the Father, because we know that we are not in this alone. We know that even when life gets hard we will have people surrounding us to remind us who we are, as individuals, and as members of this body. Vulnerability and the reality of life on life here makes life sticky, messy, and raw. Most of the time it is not given the chance to fully scab over before something else comes along to push us past the comfort of a superficial, surface-driven life. It pushes us to swim the waters of risking frustration and climb the mountains of living in tension. But there is an unexplainable joy found in these treacherous, and often times dangerous parts of life. We learn that through coming together, the journey is shared, and its not nearly as terrifying as it seemed before. We have begun to see each other truly as that conduit of Christ in each other's lives through encouragement, appreciation, and the love displayed daily to each other. The unexplainable beauty in this is that it doesn't find it's source in us, but the Spirit of the living God.
Crushed and Refined for His Will
"These Christians are a people who will throw themselves into the breach between the peace and healing of God and the loneliness, anguish, and terror of the world's lost. They stand as a bridge between man and God, willing, even eager, to become ground grain, broken bread, crushed grapes, poured out wine."
When the end goal is supposed to be the Body of Christ (bread and wine) then what good is a bunch of untarnished grapes and grain? But we walk around like this, hoping that we can still do God's will and not become crushed, and refined in the process. But that is what this process should be-- a submission to His will, His crushing and refining of our lives, our souls, and our communities.In so many ways we like this life to be easy, and we don't like going out on a limb for people. But this is exactly what this gospel calls us too- a difficult life lived out on the edge. We don't like the reality of the pain and messiness of this life, we like to stand back and be observers to the lives of others, as well as our own, turn to shambles. But what if we chose to risk frustration? What if we chose instead to submit to the will of the Father, the Spirit, the Body of Christ? What if we chose to live life along side those who need it the most: the lonely, lost, destitute, ignored, marginalized people in this world, our city, and even our neighborhood? Then we might just become ground grain, broken bread, crushed grapes, and poured out wine- The Body of Christ.
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