"I'm what the world considers to be a phenomenally successful man. And I've failed much more than I've succeeded. And each time I fail, I get my people together, and I say, "Where are we going?" And it starts to get better." - Calvin Trager
Nothing is more practical than finding God, that is, than falling in love in a quite absolute, final way.
What you are in love with, what seizes your imagination, will affect everything. It will decide what will get you out of bed in the morning, what you will do with your evenings, how you will spend your weekends, what you read, who you know, what breaks your heart, and what amazes you with joy and gratitude.
Fall in love, stay in love and it will decide everything.
It's one of those nice quotes that float in herds through email inboxes, but this one caught my attention.
I've been talking and emailing with the people who just got back from Lui, Sudan and the teams that went before. For the people just back, there is such passion and excitement in their voices. For those of us who have been before, we are hungry for news -- and thoroughly enjoying seeing our friends finally "get" what it is that we felt when we went there and when we came back.
It really is falling in love. And it has everything to do with Christ. When I went to Ghana, when I went to Sudan, I fell in love with the Christ I met in the people there. My heart was captured. My imagination was set on fire. It's why I have the job I have now. It's why I left a job I loved to take this one. And, thinking back -- it's why I had the job I had before -- because I met Christ in deeply wonderful and joyful ways in people like Amber and Sarah and Noah and Cori and Peter and Ellen and Christiana and so many others in that first class that I was hooked.
And it's what is driving this movement for the Millennium Development Goals in the Church. Falling in love. Evelyn Piety, who is our EGR contact for the Diocese of the Central Gulf Coast, said that in her work as United Thank Offering Coordinator for that Diocese, she learned never to talk about money but to talk about thankfulness and the money took care of itself. That's the same thing. That's why this movement isn't about social service or about being a global Episcopal version of the United Way.
This movement is about falling in love. It's about meeting Christ in strange and wonderful and scary places and falling completely in love so that it changes our lives - whether we want it to or not. It makes us leave secure jobs for jobs where we have to raise money for our own salaries! It makes us get on rickety planes bound for places the State Department says we shouldn't go and sleep with scorpion-like spiders scurrying around our mud huts. It makes us read and listen to and watch things that our lives would be far more comfortable ignoring -- and let our hearts be touched by them.
It's also a gift. People go through their whole lives without falling in love, and it's not necessarily vice on their part. We should all pray to fall in love this way. But when it happens, we also need to band together -- partly because it takes courage to follow the messy, scary way of this love ... but mostly because it is so much better when it is shared.
| Mike at 3/17/2006 09:15:00 AM
EGR resources and connects the church to embrace what one person, one congregation, one diocese and one church can do to make this mission of global reconciliation happen.
Want to find out more ... check our our website at www.e4gr.org.
"Christ's example is being
demeaned by the church if they ignore the new leprosy,
which is AIDS. The church is the sleeping giant here.
If it wakes up to what's really going on in the rest
of the world, it has a real role to play. If it doesn't,
it will be irrelevant."
- Bono
Episcopalians for 
