Color adds freedom

Been doing some research and reading as I pray through launching this community.  Words I read this summer come to mind.  I spent some time diving into Dietrich Bonhoeffer's "Life Together".  A deep and profound book dealing with his experiences living in an intentional community.  Here's a sample:

 “To learn not merely to tolerate, but to delight in, the freedom of the other is not the maximal requirement for the Christian.  It is a minimal description of our utter faith in God’s ways…It means the recognition, indeed our delight, that God did not make others as I would have made them.  God did not give them to me so that I could dominate and control them, but so that I might find the Creator by means of them…God does not want me to mold others into the image that’s seems good to me, that is, into my own image.  Instead, in their freedom from me God made other people in God’s own image.”    

I am deeply grateful for the diversity that God created in humanity.  It allows for color and beauty that would not be available if we were all from the same cookie cutter.  In terms of christianity, I am privileged to be opening a door into a new and exciting and vastly different way of being the church.  May I learn from those that have gone through this door before me. Here is an article I came across written in the Boston Globe back in 2008 dealing with this new form of being the church.   http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2008/02/03/the_unexpected_monks/?page=1