We are not saints. Much of the time our faith is weak and the God we have faith in seems far away if not absent altogether. But we go to church nonetheless in hope—hope that God is truly God even so, hope that God will mend us where we are broken, and forgive us where we have a hard time forgiving ourselves, and breathe into us new life when the lives we are living seem empty and increasingly diminished by age and in the last analysis doomed.
