I just finished reading Jesus Feminist by Sarah Bessey. It kind of rocked my world (in probably a different way than you would think). If you’re my friend, I’m going to force you to read it, so watch out. It’s an important book. Important for women. Important for men.

Anyway, Sarah Bessey writes beautiful prose. Her writing is the kind of writing that you think might be read at a coffee shop. (The kind of writing I usually enjoy is the kind of writing that might be read at a nerdy middle school sci-fi book club.) But, I persevered because her ideas were just so good. Something about the imagery that Bessey presents really stuck with me. Let me share with you the passage that has been coming up in my mind over and over today.

I want to stand outside here in our Canadian wilds beside the water, banging my battered old pots and pans into the wind and the cold and the heavens, hollering, “There is more room! There is more room! There is room for all of us!” (p. 4)

I’ve been listening to Shane Claiborne’s sermons too (this one is good). He lives in an intentional community in Philly where a group of Christians moved into the hood and revitalized the neighborhood by building community gardens and murals and rehabbing old houses. A handful of people, with the help of God, changed the course of an entire neighborhood.

It reminds me of Jesus’s words in Matthew 13 about the woman who took a small amount of yeast and was able to mix it into sixty pounds of flour. Just a little is enough. Just a little is the tipping point.

Today, I feel caught up in this prophetic movement- the one where the kingdom of heaven looks more like tearing down walls and building bridges than deciding who is in and who is out.

I picture a sea of Christians standing in the streets crying out, “There is more room! There is more room! There is room for all of us!” A rallying cry to let the marginalized, the broken, the lonely know that there is room.

Isn’t that the gospel message? Isn’t that essentially what Jesus said when He was here on earth?

There’s room for you in this kingdom. Space for you at the well of living water. There is a spot for you in the lap of Jesus.

You, yes, you.  The addict and the felon. The other woman and the miser. The tax collector, the stripper, the lawyer, the teacher. The young and the old. The single person and the married person and the divorced person. White, black, hispanic, Asian. The person who struggles with depression and the person who struggles with pride. The leper and the homeless. The poor and the rich.

There is more room! There is more room! There is room for all of us!

So thankful for this good news today.