“We value the Church because she is a Church Militant; and sometimes even because she militates against ourselves. She is something more than the cosmos, in the sense of completed nature or completed human nature. She proves that she is something more by sometimes being right where they are wrong.” — G.K. Chesterton, The Catholic Church and Conversion
We do not follow Christ because we want to follow our hearts and we do not believe in Him because we believe in ourselves, we place our faith in Him because we have lost faith in ourselves. We do not put our trust in Jesus because we trust our decision-making abilities, we put our trust in Jesus because we trust Him and His decisions.
We do not join a church because we think she needs our fire power. We become members of a church because we see our need for her weapons. We love the church because it is willing to oppose us. We love it because it is willing to receive us. We may come as we are, but we will not be permitted to stay as we are. We are taken from where we are and not from where we should have been, but not before we agree that where we should have been is where we will now seek to go.
We do not need a god who agree with us, we need a God who will oppose us to our faces. We do not need a fun house mirror, we need a perfect looking glass that tells us exactly how bad it is. We need to see what He has forgiven that we may go and sin no more. We need to realize how we were living in order to start living a life worthy of the Gospel of God and the life, death, resurrection, and ascension of His one and only Son, our Lord, Jesus Christ. We have to see how bad it was in order to see how good we have it. When we realize how bad we were, we begin to see how good God is.
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