The rubber hits the road when we try to show grace to a person most unlike us, even someone morally offensive.

The church works best not as a power center, rather as a countercultural community - in the world but not of it - that shows others how to live the most fulfilled and meaningful life on earth. In modern society that means rejecting the false gods of independence, success, and pleasure and replacing them with love for God and neighbor.

Be still. In that focus, all else comes into focus. In that rift in my routine, the universe falls into alignment.

Jesus reserved his hardest words for the hidden sins of hypocrisy, pride, greed and legalism.

The point of the Book of Job is not suffering: where is God When It hurts? The prologue (chapters 1-2) dealt with that issue. The point of the Book of Job is faith: Where is Job when it hurts?

I say this with care, but I wonder if a fierce, insistent desire for a miracle - even a physical healing - sometimes betrays a lack of faith rather than an abundance of it. When yearning for a miraculous resolution to a problem, do we make our loyalty to God contingent on whether he reveals himself yet again in the seen world?

Grace, like water, flows to the lowest part.