Introduction
Infi nite
The world is, far as we are concerned, infinite in this way: as individuals we will never experience all the good in the world. The billions of us who are living on the earth now, the billions who have lived before us - none of us has experienced all that the world has to offer. The billions of us have not lived out all of the potential that the world offers. This causes us pain when we think about dying. We have such wonderful experiences of the world that we don’t want to leave, we don’t want to see any of our friends leave, until we have finished experiencing all the good in the world. Yet none of us will experience the whole world. (Oddly, at the same time the world is finite in this way: as full of good as the world is, it cannot satisfy our desire for the infinite.) The world is the perfect environment for us to become what God wants us to become. God has filled the world with the tools by which we can become what he wants us to become. Nearly anything in this nearly infinite world can be used for this purpose. Still, some are more useful than others. These are the three most useful tools (or means of grace): 1) prayer, our hearts in communion with God, 2) reading the scripture that has been given to us, 3) church, being in some kind of fellowship with other people seeking the same. Prayer, scripture, and church are probably the three most powerful tools God uses in our lives to create hearts of love and lives of shalom. If we don’t have these three in our live I don’t know how we achieve our purpose. At the same time, there is a nearly infinite number and variety of other tools, other means of grace, that God uses in our hearts and lives to create love and shalom.
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