The Immeasurable Distance
August 15, 2009 by Douglas
No, I’m not referring to the distance between you and your next Starbucks encounter. Enough with the caffeine already – well, sort of. This is more about what I see in my own heart and the world around me, the immeasurable distance between what is read in the Bible and the practice of the church and Christians (me included).
Brennan Manning once said, “The greatest single cause of atheism in the world today is Christians, who acknowledge Jesus with their lips and walk out the door, and deny him with their lifestyle. That is what an unbelieving world simply finds unbelievable.”
How can this be? My personal opinion isn’t prophetic or theological, two things I’ll never likely be accused of in my lifetime. I think it’s simply that we’re fallen people in need of some emergency care. Okay, probably loads of emergency care. In fact, churches remind me more of emergency rooms (i.e., “casualty” as is said in Europe) and that’s not necessarily a bad thing at all – actually, that’s a good thing, if not a great thing.
If we come to understand this, even embrace and let others see it – I think the more they will relate to us, because after all, we’re really more like them than we may care to admit. Hey – each of us can be counted among the walking wounded, limping side by side on this journey; maybe we should consider locking arms together. Imagine that.
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