Public theologian and activist, Shane Claiborne, says, "It's really, really difficult to understand that there is a God who is good when everything around us is so ugly and broken. And, it's hard to understand that there is hope and life after death when so many people are going, "Well, is there life before death?" and "If God really loves me, then why are my kids starving to death?" And, the incredible thing I think a lot of us have felt is, as we throw those questions up at God and we say, 'God, why don't you do something about the masses of our population that are living in poverty?' we felt God say, 'I did do something. I made you.'

"And, for some strange reason, God's plan for salvation for the world is obviously Jesus. But the wild thing is that...maybe one of the greatest mysteries of our faith is that as Jesus left the disciples, he said, 'And now I am going to the Father, but you will do the same things I've been doing, and you'll do even greater things than these because I'm leaving you the Spirit.' That we are to continue to be God's mystical body...that God has no other [tangible] hands but ours, no other feet but ours. And, the strange thing is that our God does not want to change the world without us."

[Excerp from Economy of Love by Shane Claiborne, Isaac Anderson, and Relational Tithe]