The Weary Pilgrim blog recently had a post that caught my attention: The gospel...an inconvenient truth. The author spent a year in which he read and meditated on the gospels only. He relates the following:

In the year I spent reading and reflecting on the Gospels only... I guess it ruined me. It was at that collision of heart, mind and life's events that my sense of belief in the gospels changed dramatically. They had to "be-lived." If I was to find the deepest truth of the gospels, the stuff between the lines, where the Spirit inspires life, I had to live the gospels. They had to become the fabric of my life... of what holds it together.

His conclusion is that the gospel of Jesus is an inconvenient truth. As I considered the implications of this, conventional Christianity as seen in our culture bears little or no resemblance to the gospel Jesus modeled and proclaimed. His is a gospel that invades our comfort and convenience with a way of life that is foreign to us. The Weary Pilgrim sums it up this way:

The inconvenient truth of the gospels are opting to be vulnerable; being taken advantage of; absorbing pain and suffering; realizing inconvenience is a gift; taking risks; being overwhelmed; learning to be content with questions more than a clever answer; building relationships, as the art of being a gardener, being patient to see something grow; the willingness to see forgiveness as a constant state of heart, mind and soul; that there really is no such thing as them, it is "us", we're all in this together; and Grace... more, and more, and more... it's endless.
The gospel... an inconvenient truth.