Wednesday, April 26, 2006


Dietrich Bonhoeffer : Life Together (The Classic Exploration of Faith in Community)
Many people seek fellowship because they are afraid to be alone. Because they cannot stand loneliness, they are driven to seek the company of other people. There are Christians, too, who cannot endure being alone, who have had some bad experiences with themselves, who hope they will gain some help in association with others. They are generally disappointed. Then they blame the fellowship for what is really their own fault. The Christian community is not a spiritual sanatorium. The person who comes into a fellowship because he is running away from himself is misusing it for the sake of diversion, no matter how spiritual this diversion may appear. he is really not seeking community at all, but only distraction which will allow him to forget his loneliness for a brief time, the very alienation that creates the deadly isolation of man. The disintegration of communication and all genuine experience, and finally resignation and spiritual death are the result of such attempts to find a cure.

Larry Crabb says:
The truth about moving toward people in love is that disappointment is just around the corner. I don't have one meaningful relationship that is fully what I want it to be. Every person that I am connected with has let me down in some way or another. The worst part is that I have to face the fact that I have disappointed all those people to. The deeper we go in our relationships; the more acute the disappointments and the greater the pain. When we try to go deep it always leads to *resistance* in the form of conflict..

I am drawing conclusions here that are continuing to point only to me and my desire to do what is 'right in my own eyes.'
I am a conflict avoider unless I know the outcome ....and more and more I am having to surrender my desires to manage a situation or person into a knowable outcome..... into the MYSTERY of what God may be wanting......

Larry Crabb also says the point of the journey is to want what God wants more than anything......Now that's a mystery.......or is it???

7 comments:

Jada's Gigi said...

what God wants...? I think that God wants, more than anything...is to be seen and known as He really is. In His Church and through Her in the world...This is not an individual trip, so funny that you should include references to community....this is about Him and Her and Her seeing and knowing Him...in every way...
and this is the mystery hidden from the ages but now revealed in His Chrurch

jollybeggar said...

"The Christian community is not a spiritual sanatorium. The person who comes into a fellowship because he is running away from himself is misusing it for the sake of diversion, no matter how spiritual this diversion may appear."

amazing soundbyte. how many of us run away from ourselves right into the arms of others who are trying to do the same thing? and then we wonder why relationships within the church often go bad.

tragic thing about all of that is that those outside the church have been told by somebody that believers have it all together, so when they see something to the contrary they cry 'hypocrite alert!' and turn their backs on the only one whose arms are actually qualified to completely receive them.

here's a tangent: what if believers applied the restoration process outlined in matthew 18 to their relationship with themselves?

hey, thanks for stopping by my blog today.

shalom

Bar L. said...

As usual, this really got to me. Relationships are the core of life - yet they can be painful at times, even the good ones.


Is that from one of Larry Crabb's books? Which one? Thanks, Becky!

M. C. Pearson said...

Reminds me of the song by Amy Grant..."I love a lonely day"

Thanks for visiting Seek and Ye Shall Find. I've posted you on the links as a Fellow Seeker! Come again...comments are always enjoyed!

Anonymous said...

I don't think wanting what God wants more than anything is a mystery. I think it should be what every believer desires. Now....knowing whatt God wants can be more of a mystery and it is only a mystery when we have not built a relationship with Him through prayer and The Word because in doing so we will have discernment provided by The Holy Spirit which will direct us to what God wants from each believing individual/child of His

Dara Pierre-Louis said...

wanting what god wants more than anything. i want to get to that point more than anything.

Gigi said...

Remember Diva......in case you've never heard it before...a seeking heart HE NEVER denies....