MUSEUMS AND HOSPITALS

Morton Kelsey wrote: "The church is not a museum for saints but a hospital for sinners."

How true this is, and how easily we self-righteously and pridefully forget it. Pride. The ugliest of words, and the most prevalent of sicknesses in this fallen world of ours.

I have been tremendously busy and detained for the past few weeks and months and therefore unable to post anything to this blog. And I have also been thinking that while it is a place I love to return to and to add to, that it may be time to move on and close it down. I am entertaining the idea of a new blog and a new direction as I am beyond the point of needing a new direction in my life. Simply put, I need not only grace, but the grace to recognize it at work in my life. I am hoping that a new blog may help me (and others) do exactly that. And so I will likely go in that direction, but before I go, leave you today with the following passage from what is becoming one of my favorite books, Brennan Manning's The Ragamuffin Gospel.

For that is truly what I am. A ragamuffin to the nth degree.

When I get honest, I admit I am a bundle of paradoxes. I believe and I doubt, I hope and get discouraged, I love and I hate, I feel bad about feeling good, I feel guilty about not feeling guilty. I am trusting and suspicious. I am honest and I still play games. Aristotle said I am a rational animal; I say I am an angel with an incredible capacity for beer.

To live by grace means to acknowledge my whole life story, the light side and the dark. In admitting my shadow side, I learn who I am and what God's grace means. As Thomas Merton put it, "A saint is not someone who is good but who experiences the goodness of God."