Forty Days of Community

The always insightful Frederick Buechner writes:
"Your life and my life flow into each other as wave flows into wave, and unless there is peace and joy and freedom for you, there can be no real peace or joy or freedom for me. To see reality--not as we expect it to be but as it is--is to see that unless we live for each other and in and through each other, we do not really live very satisfactorily; that there can really be life only where there really is, in just this sense, love.”
As our church begins the Forty Days of Community series by Rick Warren and Saddleback Church, I can't help but believe that Buechner is right. That there is no real inner peace, no sense of true satisfaction unless there is peace for the people around us.
Christ said to "love your neighbor," a simple truth the Church has failed to live up to. We've evangelized the world. Come to Christ or burn in hell. We've pushed our social agenda. God created Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve. But we haven't done a fine job of loving our neigbhor. If you are hungry, we'll feed you. If you are tired, we'll give you rest. If you are hurting, we'll cry with you. If you doubt, we'll question with you.
The existence of Rick Warren's book, as necessary as it seems, indicates a collosal failure on our part.