Small Groups

I’ve been reading Brennan Mannings book The Ragamuffin Gospel this summer. In it he offers some great insight on grace and faith and being real with God. It’s refreshing to see a married alcoholic Catholic priest display such raw humanness and genuine faith. He doesn’t hold much back. He allows his readers into his story, without pretense or condition. His work reveals the power of transparency – his story is messy and broken. But that’s what makes it great. We’re all like that to some extent. We’re messy, broken, dirty people who are in the process of being redeemed daily. We’ve all got baggage. We’ve all got skeletons in the closet. We’ve all got issues. We’ve all got sin. BUT, we’re all under grace and so we all have freedom and life and purity and forgiveness and value and love and mercy and community.

This is the tricky part. I think we often forget that other people are messed up, so they’re going to frustrate us sometimes because they’re not perfect. And just as often we forget that our own lives are pretty messy, too. So we’re going to frustrate others. And I think this is all compounded when we remember that we’re dirty and sinful but forget that others aren’t any better. It complicates things, doesn’t it, when we feel like we have to hide our sin or pretend to be “better” than we really are? But listen to what Manning says in his book:

“The way we are with each other is the truest test of our faith. How I treat a brother or a sister from day to day, how I react to the sin-scarred others, how deal with normal people in their normal confusion on a normal day may be a better indication of my reverence for life than the antiabortion sticker on the bumper of my car.”

Our faith is played out in how we treat others. In how we offer them forgiveness and grace. But also in how we offer them the respect and trust to deal with us fairly. Our faith is played out in how we are willing to share our stories and our hurts and pains and fears and failures and victories and joys and hopes. When we get to this point of letting other people in, not too soon so as to scare them off, but little by little, then we can really share life together as God has intended it and watch redemption and restoration happen right in our midst. When we share life together in this way, raw and uncut, then life becomes full. This is the power of small groups – having a close group of people who share the journey with you and who you can let in, trusting that they’ll shine some light in your darkness and that you’ll do the same for them.