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Spiritual Care Liturgies
The Long View
It helps now and then to step back and take the long view.
The Kingdom is not only beyond our efforts. It is even beyond our vision.
We accomplish in our life time only a fraction of the magnificent enterprise that is God's work. Nothing we do is complete, which another way of saying that the Kingdom always likes beyond us.
No statement says all that could be said.
No prayer fully expresses our faith.
No confession fully accomplishes the church's mission.
No set of goal and objectives includes everything.
This what we are about. . . .
We plant seeds that one day will grow.
We water seeds already planted, knowing that they hold future promise.
We lay foundations that will need further development.
We provide yeast that produces effects beyond our capabilities.
We cannot do everything, and there is a sense of liberation in realizing that.
This enables us to do something and do it very well.
It may be incomplete, but its a beginning, a step along the way, an opportunity for God's grace to enter and do the rest.
We may never see the end results, but that is the difference between the master builder and the worker. We are workers not master builcers. Ministers, not messiahs. We are all prophets of a future that is not our own.
-- Archbishop Oscar Romero