THE CHURCH

The visible church is all the people who get together from time to time in God's name. Anybody can find out who they are by going to church to look.

The invisible church is all the people God uses for his hands and feet in this world. Nobody can find out who they are except God.

Think of them as two circles. The optimist says they are concentric. The cynic says they don't even touch. The realist says they occasionally overlap.

Frederick Buechner

HOLY BEST

But when it comes to putting broken lives back together— when it comes, in religious terms, to the saving of souls— the human best tends to be at odds with the holy best. To do for yourself the best that you have it in you to do — to grit your teeth and clench your fists in order to survive the world at its harshest and worst — is, by that very act, to be unable to let something be done for you and in you that is more wonderful still. The trouble with steeling yourself against the harshness of reality is that the same steel that secures your life against being destroyed secures your life also against being opened up and transformed by the holy power that life itself comes from. You can survive on your own. You can grow strong on your own. You can even prevail on your own. But you cannot become human on your own.

Frederick Buechner