Over the past 24 hours my heart has been on a roller coaster. I just started the six-week quest, The Hole in our Gospel (small group study). Going in to it I was unsure what God wanted to do in me. I was also unsure what he was going to do in my heart, but I knew it would be big. I thought it was going to take time. But once again I was wrong. My heart was broken immediately.

Some of you are probably wondering what the “hole in our gospel” could be. Don’t worry I was thinking the same thing.

Richard Stearns, the president of World Vision, first provoked my mind and then shortly after my heart followed, but in my heart it was a deeper provoking. In the first chapter of his book, The Hole in Our Gospel, he shared a story about his friend, Jim Wallis, who, at this time, was a seminary student at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School near Chicago. He and some of his classmates had an idea. They went through the entire Bible and underlined every single verse that dealt with poverty, wealth, justice, and oppression. Then they took scissors and cut every one of those verses out of the Bible. After that the Bible barely held together. The remaining Bible was in shambles. Then his friend said, “Brothers and sisters, this is our American Bible; it is full of holes. Each one of us might as well take our Bibles, a pair of scissors, and begin cutting out all the scriptures we pay no attention to, all the biblical text that we just ignore.” The bible was literally full of holes. The word hole is defined: A hollowed place in something solid.

Questions that I had to ask myself:

Is there a hole in my “gospel/good news”?

Is my understanding of the nature of God’s call misunderstood?

I realized that I have chosen to pay little to no attention to holes in my Bible. I need to pay attention to the whole Bible. Every single word of God matters, not just the ones that apply to my life at this moment in time (it is all applicable).
The challenge for me, and possibly you as well: Getting what I know in my head into my heart and then out to my hands and feet - showing the love of Christ in a tangible way.

“Christ has no body now on earth but yours, no hands but yours, no feet but yours. Yours are the eyes through which Christ’s compassion is to look out on to the earth. Yours are the feet by which he is to go about doing good and yours are the hands by which he is to bless us now.”
-St. Teresa of Avila