Quotables

Berkeley Breathed, creator of the Greatest Comic Strip Ever (Bloom County), once said "What seems funny to a sleep-deprived brain at 4 a.m. reads as merely hallucinogenic when laid down on the sober newsprint of a newpaper."

I'll let you decide for yourselves if my recounting of the saga of getting P.T.'s new Great Dane "Apollo: 'Roid-dog of the Cosmos" (see yesterday's blog) fits into that category.

Todd Hunter wrote on his site a while back:

"I am not so much down on the church - and if I catch myself in such a state I severely rebuke myself - as I am "up" on figuring out what it means to be the people of God: from creation, to Israel, to the church, to the renewed cosmos. What is God's ultimate intention in and through this Story?"

While a discussion on how to live in biblical and relevant communities of faith in a postmodern world will inevitably require a serious investigation of how to (re)structure what "church" is and can be (remember, we only de-construct in order to re-construct), I have to look over my own writings (and my interaction with the writings of other blogging friends), and wonder if at times I have gotten so caught up in the fervor of "proving" points of view that I've inadvertantly forgotten that, when all is said and done, this is God's thing -- not ours.

I have to stop every now and then, give my head a shake, pour myself some more Tim Horton's double-double coffee, and remind myself that Jesus is FAR more concerned, more interested, and more proactive than I could ever hope to be, in seeing His Bride healthy and functional. And He is far more in love with the Bride than many of us "anarchists" have been -- and we need to re-capture that love for the Bride. Any re-constructing based on a love of the Bride will look a lot different than creating something out of a reaction against "church as we've known it".

It might even look like the church Jesus had in mind when He said "upon this rock I will build My church, and the gates of hell will not prevail against it."