There was the Apostle Paul who devised a grand scheme to evangelize the region of Spain. He, too, was na ve. Barton Stone and the Campbells sought to unify the church and produced several new communions in the process. Mother Theresa did all she could to alleviate the suffering of the poor in India. She is gone, but the suffering remains.
Church history is replete with stories of failures who changed the world.
The church s very job is to fail, not due to lethargy or circumstances, but because we re na ve enough to believe we can bring this entire world to Christ. Let us be grand in our assumptions as we seek to determine what God would have us do. The best we can do is fail. A person s memory is not just a function of the mind, it is the sacred trust that preserves our past and gives us an identity. Alzheimer s Disease, as David Keck points out in this brilliant book dedicated to his mother, an Alzheimer s patient, poses a unique problem because, by erasing the memory, it effectively annihilates a person s identity, the story of her or his life.