The Relational Mission

"A new beginning! We must learn to live each day, each hour, yes, each minute as a new beginning, as a unique opportunity to make everything new. Imagine that we could live each moment as a moment pregnant with new life. Imagine that we could live each day as a day full of promises. Imagine that we could walk through the new year always listening to a voice saying to us, "I have a gift for you and can't wait for you to see it! Imagine!" Henri Nouwen, Here and Now , 16 For years, I would read a Henri Nouwen book about once every 12-18 months. I would mark it up, take notes, and copy quotes like this in my journal. Then I would put the book aside and think, "Well, I'm just not there yet." Upon reading his stuff, I would get what he is saying conceptually, but my soul didn't get what he was really saying. I felt like a little league baseball player watching the high school team practice. Then I realized that I had never been through the period...

I'm reading A Life Together by Seraphim Sigrist, a Bishop in the Orthodox Church who learned what it meant to follow Jesus in underground home churches in the former Soviet Union. This little book is a gem with a message forged under great pressure and resistance. In the introduction he writes: "Now, if the gift of ourselves and the ability to stand on our own feet is a first discovery in community, I would add a second discovery and gift found in community. Our continuing agreement to share life together opens out into deeper and deeper oneness with the others of our community. We live into a friendship in a full sense that Jesus spoke of when he said, 'From now on I call you friends.'      Community is an ongoing entering into friendship, for the mystery of community is that of friends, and the giving of our lives for our friends. This friendship is the ongoing gift of the ever deeper realization of the law of sharing and exchange, living Jesus' command to ...