Victorious limp

My world has been rocked lately by Brennan Manning's book RAGAMUFFIN GOSPEL... This is some of the excerpt I read today and I just had to copy the best parts. 

The biblical image of the victorious life reads more like the victorious limp. Jesus was victorious not because He never flinched, talked back, or questions, but having flinched talked back, and questioned, He remained faithful…. Our whole understanding of God is based in a quid pro quo of bartered love. He will love us if we are good, moral, and diligent. But we have turned the tables so that he will love us, rather than living because he has already loved us. (175-177)

Faithfulness requires the courage to risk everything on Jesus, the willingness to keep growing, and the readiness to risk failure throughout our lives… Risking everything on Jesus: the ragamuffins gospel says we can’t lose, because we have nothing to lose. Faithfulness to Jesus implies that with all our sins, scars, and insecurities, we satnd with Him; that we are formed and informed by His Word… The willingness to keep growing: Unfaithfulness is a refusal to become, a rejection or grace (grace that is inactive is an illusion), and the refusal to be oneself… The readiness to risk failure: Many of us are haunted by our failure to have done with our lives what we longed to accomplish. This disparity between our ideal self and our real self, the grim specter of past infidelities, the awareness that I am not living what I believe, the relentless pressure of conformity, and the nostalgia for lost innocence reinforces a nagging sense of existential guilt: I have failed. This is the cross we never expected, and the one we find hardest to bear. (185-186)

The ragamuffin who sees his life as a voyage of discovery and runs the risk of failure has a better feel for faithfulness than the timid man who hides behind the law and never finds out who he is at all. Winston Churchill said “success is never final; failure is never fatal. It is the courage that counts.” (187)