I listened to an interview with my favorite author, Donald Miller, the other day. Don was talking about his next book called A Map of Eden about a guy named Adam Bybee (he is not sure when the book will be released, but he sounded optimistic).
I thought this was going to be a fictional book, but it sounds like Adam is a real person who is kind of a performance artist whose work focuses on social justice issues. Apparently he has done some pretty amazing things.
The thing is… Adam has issues. Don said he thought it was going to be a great book about social justice and would raise awareness about this amazing Christian activist. He went in thinking that Adam would become our “Che Guevera,” he would be the guy who starts a "revolution."
But none of that turned out to be true.
It turns out Adam is a guy who, like so many of us, is just trying to earn God’s acceptance and he does it by championing social justice issues. So while everything Adam is doing is great, Don said that after talking with him a while he began to see why he is doing it.
Then Don said something, in his typical nonchalant way that caught me completely off guard. He said that he looked at Adam and thought “Wow, all these great things wouldn’t get done if you weren’t broken.”
The truth is we are all broken. We all want to do great things for God out of pure motives, but our pride, selfish ambition, or greed always seems to get mixed in. The good news is that I think God already knows this. He says that, “we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us” (2 Cor 4:7).
We’re all in process and in the meantime God can continue to use us, despite our fragility, to do incredible things for his kingdom.
Great thought Paul! And it's good to stumble on your blog.
Hope things are going well for you:)
Posted by: Brad | March 03, 2007 at 02:09 PM