Why build a church when you can build a hospital?
Understand that a hospital without supplies is a church.
That a prayer is a deed when no deeds can be done.
That direct contact with the sacred and holy is involvement with life.
That life cannot be conquered, bad luck banished or violence eliminated.
And that the providence of good people is to invoke a larger context in the worst of times.
You certainly couldn’t call these times “good.”
You need to know this.
Work is not our measurement of Being.
Instead, we are the push and pull of the world around us. The words of our grandmothers and grandparents, the promises of our parents, the joy of our aunts and uncles, the play of our peers. These relationships are more lasting and practical than a day’s worth of labor because they speak to the health of the world.
We currently live in a thoroughly dysfunctional world. One where institutions try to convince us that faith cannot be examined and schooling cannot be questioned. A system that measures worth by illusions created by people who hate the fact the world does not bend to their whim.
Don’t listen to it. Their way–which speaks only of the value of work and reward only after all work can no longer be done–is, in fact, just another name for abuse and slavery.
Life is the river; want, the sediment beneath us.
To navigate the turbulent or turgid moments in the flow, first learn not to pile up barriers.
Be content in the knowledge that barriers will emerge on their own soon enough.