God seems to sometimes show up in the least likely
places. In the midst of our crap, God
reveals Himself and His ways to us, and if we choose to search and see it, it
can be transformative. This is the
premise of Nadia Bolz-Weber’s book Accidental
Saints: Finding God in All the Wrong People.
Nadia Bolz-Weber, Lutheran and founding pastor of the
church House for All Sinners and Saints in Denver, has a depth of understanding
of living in this messed up world as a messed up person. She writes from the vulnerable places in her
heart, and her personality in all its unstereotypical beauty and rawness shines
through.
She acknowledges that we live in a world that admires
only the strong, but God blesses the weak, and in those He may give us our
greatest lessons, especially if we can count ourselves among them. Through the stories of the least likely
people whom she expects to hear from God, she shows how God reveals His grace,
not so much in a warm fuzzy blanket but more like painfully being knocked to
the ground. We must be willing to look
beyond the surface of people and our assumptions about them and see that they,
too, are a child of God for whom Christ’s body was broken. She expresses the true meaning of living in
Christian community with one another, sharing of the bread and wine among
people who are very different but share the common bond of faith, and thus
struggling through life together while displaying and receiving God’s grace and
mercy.
Sometimes I am frustrated by my lack of gradual
transformation. Nadia shows us that it
is not necessarily about trying to grow or seeking growth through spiritual
disciplines, but rather, it’s about seeking God and seeing Him in others as
well as in our weaknesses. It’s about
grace, love, and mercy – giving it and receiving it. People are drawn to freedom and are hungry
for freedom, not the “Christian lifestyle”.
Christian community is a coming together to live and tell and be made
into the story of Jesus together, a melting and being re-formed. While I struggled with some of her descriptive word choices (aka profanity), I absolutely loved this book.
For further information about this book, click on the
following:
Book Info
I received a
complimentary copy of this book from Blogging for Books (Convergent Publishing)
in exchange for my honest review.
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