What is the gutter you came from? Do you remember or are you content in the little bubble you now live in? These are some of my thoughts as I read "The Gutter" by Craig Gross. I tend to forget we all have our own gutters we came from. Mine may not have been the porn industry, a horrible marriage, a drug dealers lifestyle, an absentee dad or prison, but that doesn't mean I didn't come from the gutter. We can't deny our past nor should we forget. We need to remember how lost, alone, and in need of love we were (and still are). As Christians it should drive us to the gutters to show that His love is available to everyone who wants it. It really is that simple. We want to make it more complicated than that, but really the only difference of our faith is that we have been brought out of our gutters. We know His love. We aren't better, just relocated. Two quotes from what I've read so far in the book.
"Don't blame the dark for being dark. Blame the light for not shining on the dark."
"While the missions couldn't be simpler, I've noticed that many of us in the Church would rather sit back and criticize what others do instead of actually doing something ourselves." (The mission is to go to the gutter and show His love. Seems strangely like the Great commission to me.)
So where have you been and what are you going to do? Pretty simple, huh?
1 comment:
I like that quote: don't blame the dark for being dark. Blame the light for not shining on the dark.
The problem with people who are in the dark ( my experience) is that on surface they don't really know they're in the dark. That was my own experience of darkness. It still is in a relative way.
But people, if left to themselves will always only repeat their mistakes, that 's the natural way (the bootstrap way). But it takes something supernatural (light) to shake things
up. I think something happens when people live out their faith, (in a real way) in the world.
Good quote. Thanks for that.
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