A mission...a mission from...Beast

Weather: 36 degrees and cloudy
Mood: Hmmm....
Listening to: Sin Bandera, sb
Where am I? Work

The Beast just called me and asked me to pick up a book for him, The Cost of Discipleship, because of a quote by the author of that book he'd read in another book. Clear as a bell.

So I found the book, which is 15 years older than I am, donated to us sometime after it was inscribed, in 1959, with these words: "Hope this means as much to you as it has to me -- Bryand."

Bonhoeffer is a hero of mine, an unlikely-looking hero too. Niemöller and Bonhoeffer were cut from the same cloth (no pun intended), but Bonhoeffer took a stand that led to certain death, while Niemöller somehow managed to survive the camps and was able to work for peace for the remainder of his life after the war.

ANYWAY. Searching for The Beast's orginal quote led me to this talk from Bonhoeffer's book Life Together. And these words jumped out at me:

"The man who fashions a visionary ideal of community demands that it be realized by God, by others, and by himself. He enters the community of Christians with his demands, sets up his own laws, and judges the brethren and God himself accordingly. He stands adamant, a living reproach to all others in the circle of the brethren. He acts as if he is the creator of the Christian community, as if his dream binds men together.

When things do not go his way, he calls the effort a failure. When his ideal picture is destroyed, he sees the community going to smash. So he becomes, first an accuser of his brethren, then an accuser of God, and finally the despairing accuser of himself."

So help me, these are precisely the words I was trying to find Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday this week. Which is to say, in modern terms, "Been there, done that, hate the T-shirt on me and on others."

And that may be what keeps me from quitting.