Better Quoted than Created

Sometimes words smack you in your face like a rolled up wet towel and you just have to regurgitate, or retweet in a larger than 140 character format.  I started reading Michael Yaconelli's book Messy Spirituality tonight.  Michael died tragically in a 1 car accident in 2003.   Karla, his wife, writes the  foreword and in it she imagines what he might say to you and what he definitely would say to me.  Here are his words via her imagination:

Take heart, my friends.  You are in good company.  You, with all your faults and imperfections; you, with your defects and failures; you, with your hang-ups and emotional scars; you, with all of your blunders, brokenness, and floundering; you are God's beloved, God's favored, the disciple whose name God calls, the one Jesus prefers to hang with, and laugh with.  You are the one whom the holy God of heaven and earth longs to spend time with.  You are all of this and more.  You always have been. And you always will be.


-Karla Yaconelli (March, 2007)


**God's preference for "screwups" is much more inclusive than this statement may sound, given the fact that we're all pretty much losers.  Some of us are simply more acutely aware of our all-encompassing "messiness" (to use Michael's term) than others.