Are You 'Good Enough'? | Sojourners

Are You 'Good Enough'?

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Would a ‘Christian nation’ have the highest incarceration rate than any other nation in the world? Shutterstock.com

I don’t know about you, and the people you know, but most people I know who call themselves Christians are particularly proud of the certainty that they are ‘good enough.’

It’s an odd phrase when you think about it: in a world simmering with chaos, injustice, upheaval, oppression, poverty, and human trafficking, in our cities filled with addiction and unrest, our prisons cramped and over-flowing, do any of us really believe that the best we can do is ‘good enough’?

Can many of us actually congratulate ourselves or our faith communities for our impact on our neighborhoods, schools, or cities?

Sometimes I hear the United States proudly proclaimed as a ‘Christian nation,’ and I must admit that I often respond in shock; I have to admit that I have to control myself to keep from saying, “You must have an extremely low bar of expectations of what a ‘Christian nation’ would look like!”

“Would anything like a ‘Christian nation’ have the highest incarceration rate (by far) than any other nation in the world?”

“Would a ‘Christian nation’ have the highest murder, addiction, divorce, and suicide rate of any in the world?”

I love my country and my faith, but I see that both have succumbed to the paralyzing mediocrity of believing that ‘good enough’ is good enough.

Morf Morford considers himself a free-range Christian who is convinced that God expects far more of us than we can ever imagine, but somehow thinks God knows more than we do. To pay his bills, he’s been a teacher for adults (including those in his local county jail) in a variety of setting including Tribal colleges, vocational schools and at the university level in the People’s Republic of China. Within an academic context, he also writes an irreverent ESL blog and for the Burnside Writers Collective. As he’s getting older, he finds himself less tolerant of pettiness and dairy products.\

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