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But when we come together for the meal that is at the center of the church's life, we encounter the persistent brokenness of Christ's body. Two Catholic priests serve on the U.S. board and have made crucial contributions to our predominantly Protestant organization. But at the Communion table, they are unable to serve the elements or partake of them.

Those experiences compel us to pray for the restoration of the unity of the church, and to love and serve one another until that restoration takes place.

At times like these, I feel especially like Grace, intensely aware of the brokenness of our body and the ways we are handicapped in our witness in the world. Calling the poor our friends, making partners of those from very different cultural backgrounds, advancing the calling of women as well as men—all of these are demanding and humbling commitments that more often reveal our disabilities than our abilities.

So Grace has become, for me, a symbol of hope. After all, she and her mother survived. Paradoxically yet wonderfully, even with their broken hearts and a missing limb, they had something to offer me.

Community with those like Grace is a community of the broken and incomplete—but I believe it is also the beginning of the kingdom arriving in all its wholeness, for Grace and for us.

Copyright © 2007 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Christopher Heuertz has also written 'Subverting Evangelicalism' for The Other Journal.

'An Upside-Down World' was the January 2007 Christian Vision Project article

More CVP articles from Christianity Today and our sister publications are available on ChristianVisionProject.com.

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February 2007, Vol. 51, No. 2