“God isn’t looking for servants. God isn’t looking for slaves, workers, contestants to play the game or jump the hoops correctly. God is simply looking for images! God wants images of God to walk around the earth…. God wants usable instruments who will carry the mystery, who can bear the darkness and the light, who can hold the paradox of incarnation—flesh and spirit, human and divine, joy and suffering, at the same time, just as Jesus did. Watch what Jesus does, and do the same thing!” (Richard Rohr in Things Hidden)

Here is Richard Rohr’s antidote to the spiritual to-do list, the guilty hand-wringing,  and the battle of the shoulds, woulds, and coulds. God is not looking for Stepford wives (or husbands) to act perfectly in a spiritual play.  God is looking for “usable instruments” marching through life in the Kingdom in perfect tune with Jesus.  Our interactions with people are not about this action or that behavior so much as about “bearing the darkness” and bringing the light.  When we live out the paradoxes we see in the life of Jesus, we are free from “rightness” and  self-righteousness and ready to follow him into the fray.