Thursday, May 21, 2015

Messy

Messy Spirituality: God's Annoying Love for Imperfect People  -     By: Michael Yaconelli

Some quotes from the book:


People who are desperate for spirituality very seldom worry about the mess they make on their way to be with Jesus.

Messy Spirituality is the scandalous assertion that following Christ is anything but tidy and neat, balanced and orderly. Far from it. Spirituality is complex, complicated, and perplexing—the disorderly, sloppy, chaotic look of authentic faith in the real world.


Life with Jesus is meant to be lived, not smothered, dissected, inspected, or condemned.


Followers of Christ are odd. Oddness is important because it is the quality that adds color, texture, variety, beauty to the human condition. Christ doesn't make us the same. What he does is affirm our differentness. Oddness is important because the most dangerous world in Western culture is sameness. Sameness is a virus that infects members of industrialized nations and causes an allergic reaction to anyone who is different. This virus affects the decision-making part of our brains, resulting in an obsession with making the identical choices everyone else is making.

Sameness is a disease with disastrous consequences.---differences are ignored, uniqueness is not listened to, our gifts are cancelled out. Life, passion, and joy are snuffed out. Sameness is the result of sin and does much more than infect us with lust and greed; it flattens the human race, franchises us, attempts to make us all homogenous. Sameness is the cemetery where our distinctiveness is buried. In a sea of sameness, no one has an identity. But Christians do have an identity. We're aliens! We are the odd ones, the strange ones, the misfits, the outsiders, the incompatibles. Oddness is a gift from God and sits dormant until God's Spirit gives it life and shape.


Spiritual growth is more than a procedure; it's a wild search for God in the tangled jungle of our souls, a search which involves a volatile mix of messy reality, wild freedom, frustrating stuckness, in creasing slowness, and a healthy dose of gratitude.

                                                                                 -Michael Yaconelli

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