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The Crooked Steeple Bible in a Year: 1 Chronicles 7–9; John 6:22–44 My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness. 2 Corinthians 12:9 2 Corinthians 12:1-10 Turns out that crooked church steeples make people nervous. When we visited some friends, they shared how, after a fierce windstorm, their church’s proud steeple was crooked, causing some alarm. Of course, the church quickly repaired the flagging spire, but the humorous image got me thinking. Often church is seen as a place where everything is expected to look perfect; it’s not seen as a place where we can show up crooked. Right? But in a fallen, broken world, all of us are “crooked,” each with our own collection of natural weaknesses. We might be tempted to keep our vulnerabilities under wraps, but Scripture encourages the opposite attitude. In 2 Corinthians 12, for example, Paul suggests that it’s in our weaknesses—for him, an unnamed struggle he calls a “thorn in my flesh” (v. 7)—that Christ is most likely to reveal His power. Jesus had told Paul, “My power is made perfect in weakness” (v. 9). So Paul concluded, “For Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong” (v. 10). We may not like our imperfections, but hiding them only denies Jesus’s power to work within those aspects of ourselves. When we invite Jesus into the crooked places in us, He gently mends and redeems in ways our effort could never accomplish. Reflect & Pray What are some of the “crooked” places in your life? In what ways have you seen God work through your imperfections? Invite Jesus into your imperfections for His mending. 
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Two thoughts came to mind.... the first is that many little things in the natural, like that crooked steeple, inspire a spiritual lesson for us. The other was a song I knew a long time ago about our lives having many rooms that Jesus walks through and cleans them up, but there is often that "one" room where we don't even want to let him into it. Be a prism, spreading God's light and love, not a mirror reflecting the world's hatred.
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