Accidental Saints: Finding God in All the Wrong People

by Nadia Bolz-Weber

The power of unbounded mercy, of what we call The Gospel, cannot be destroyed by corruption and toothy TV preachers. Because in the end, there is still Jesus.

My opinions feel good until I crash from the self-righteous sugar high, then realize I’m still sick and hungry for a taste of mercy.

Of course if no one had ever been exposed to dangerous ideas from scandalous women, Christianity itself would not have had its unique beginning nor its glorious history, but whatever.

Sometimes the fact that there is nothing about you that makes you the right person to do something is exactly what God is looking for.

Images of Mary remind us of God’s favor. Mary is what it looks like to believe that we already are who God says we are.

Perhaps we each have a wound, a vulnerable place that we have to protect in order to survive. And yet sometimes we overcompensate so much for the things we are trying to hide that no one ever suspects the truth…and then we are left in the true aloneness of never really being known.

Some things just have to be sung to be heard fully,

But to be religious (despite all the negative associations with that word) is to be human in the midst of other humans who are as equally messed up and obnoxious and forgiven as ourselves.