Design · Culture · Spirituality

This Beautiful Mess – Chapter Four

Chapter four of This Beautiful Mess begins the part of the book that is designed to teach us how to see the kingdom of God. It’s already here, but obviously there are many Christians who don’t appear to see it the way Jesus intended it to be seen.

The part of this chapter that gripped me starts like this:

One of the biggest challenges to following Jesus into His kingdom is not a lack of direction but a lack of desire. Most of us don’t really want to do it.

I’m often in that boat. I want to do a lot of things that I don’t ever actually start doing. He continues with some stories of the beginnings of his church, Imago Dei.

We had just enough desire to show up, pray, and get honest-and that’s what we told God… We told God that we wanted to care but didn’t-not really. We told Him we were afraid to follow Him completely because we didn’t want to look like idiots; we didn’t want to risk losing our comforts.

And this is where it begins. We begin to see ways we can engage with the heart of Jesus that we didn’t see before. We begin to want to do those things, and the things we saw and didn’t want to do.

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About the Designer

Jonathan Stegall is a web designer and emergent / emerging follower of Jesus currently living in Atlanta, seeking to abide in the creative tension between theology, spirituality, design, and justice.

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