We live in a society void of encouragement. People are starving for positive feedback and appreciation. One of the practices for building community and cultivating gratitude is writing notes (handwritten, preferably) to those in your life who have been an encouragement. This practice builds up others and helps you be more grateful and more awake to the ways God uses other people in your life.
RESOURCES
Berry, Wendell. Jayber Crow. Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2000.
Pohl, Christine D. Living into Community: Cultivating Practices That Sustain Us. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2012.
Thurman, Howard. Jesus and the Disinherited. Boston: Beacon, 1993.
Wirzba, Norman. Agrarian Spirit: Cultivating Faith, Community, and the Land. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2022.
1. Bonhoeffer, Life Together, 26–27.
2. Bonhoeffer, Berlin: 1932–1933, 263.
3. Bonhoeffer, Life Together, 20.
4. “The whole point of this distinction between the work of Christ and that of the Spirit is that it allows Bonhoeffer to maintain that the church really is a reality of revelation, but that it is so in a way that (from our human and sinful standpoint) is never directly available to us” (Mawson, Christ Existing as Community, 130).
5. Robinson, Death of Adam, 110.
6. See Haynes, Bonhoeffer Phenomenon.
7. For Bonhoeffer, religionless Christianity was getting to the core of Christianity, as he saw holy orders and the sacraments being defiled in support of Hitler. He was seeing Christians who took on the name of Christ and yet committed atrocities.
8. Robinson, Death of Adam, 122.
9. Bonhoeffer, Life Together, 38.
10. Bonhoeffer, “The Church and the Jewish Question,” 226.
11. Bonhoeffer, Testament to Freedom, 92.
12. Fabrycky, Keys to Bonhoeffer’s Haus, 85.
13. Mawson, Christ Existing as Community, 64.
14. Werntz, From Isolation to Community, 9.
15. This insight is in Werntz, From Isolation to Community, which summarizes two of Bonhoeffer’s lesser-known works, Act and Being and Sanctorum Communio.
16. Even by himself, Bonhoeffer recognizes the undeniable reality of communion. “The prisoner, the sick person, the Christian living in the diaspora recognizes in the nearness of a fellow Christian a physical sign of the gracious presence of the triune God. They receive each other’s blessings as the blessings of the Lord Jesus Christ” (Bonhoeffer, Life Together, 18).
17. Bonhoeffer, Life Together, 33.
18. Introduction to Life Together, Prayerbook of the Bible, 8.
19. Bonhoeffer, Discipleship, 139.
20. Bonhoeffer, Life Together, 43.
21. Bosanquet, Life and Death of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, 157.
22. Bonhoeffer, Testament to Freedom, 424.
23. Bosanquet, Life and Death of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, 157–59.
24. Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, 303.
25. Introduction to Life Together, 13.
Conclusion
WHOLE PERSONS AND HOLY PERSONS
One of the lasting legacies of the early church, then, is the recognition that doctrine, prayer, and ethics don’t exist in tidy separate compartments: each one shapes the others. And in the church in any age, we should not be surprised if we become lazy about our doctrine at a time when we are less clear about our priorities as a community, or if we become less passionate about service, forgiveness, and peace when we have stopped thinking clearly about the true and eternal character of God.
—Rowan Williams, The Two Ways
In the movie Talladega Nights, Will Ferrell plays a race car driver named Ricky Bobby. One day, when he is a child, his absentee father shows up at Ricky’s classroom for Career Day. Shocked after not seeing his father for eight years, Ricky Bobby is excited to hear from his dad, who is a semi-professional race car driver and an amateur tattoo artist.
Ricky’s dad gets kicked out of class for encouraging kids not to listen to their “know-it-all teacher” and a few other controversial remarks. After being forcibly removed, he peels out of the parking lot and shouts to his son, “Always remember, Ricky: if you ain’t first, you’re last.”
Ricky Bobby goes on to become a famous race car driver. But after a tragic accident, he has trouble going fast again. At his low point, Ricky’s dad comes back in the picture, and Ricky confesses that he has achieved all his fame because of those parting words from his dad. His dad admits he was high on drugs when he said that, because it doesn’t make any sense at all. “You can be second, third, fourth. Hell, you can even be fifth.”
Hurt, Ricky declares, “I’ve lived my whole life by that phrase.”
