where are we called to create culture? At the intersection of grace and cross. Where do we find our work and play bearing awe-inspiring fruit—and at the same time find ourselves able to identify with Christ on the cross? That intersection is where we are called to dig into the dirt, cultivate and create.

Frederick Buechner writes that your calling is found “where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”

Jesus’ cultural creativity led him to a cross; the cross led him, and us, to joy. Any Christ-shaped calling is cross-shaped.

Finding grace is not a matter of taking an aptitude test, discovering our gifts, and happily restricting our activities only to those things we find pleasant. Rather, over and over in the lives of God’s people we see a pattern: abundance alongside suffering, growing fruit but also dying seeds, grace and the cross. Grace itself leads us to the

GRACE AND THE CROSS

Grace is not an exemption from failure. It is, however, what makes it possible to sustain hope in the midst of failure.

Most of the time most of us propose a new cultural good, we will fail. Sometimes our failure will be temporary—sometimes it will be perennial.

GRACE AND FAILURE

Even then the disciplines can school us in just how wayward our hearts tend to be, humbling us further by exposing the fear and pride that make us so easily distracted and of so little lasting use. There may be no greater value to the disciplines than to regularly bring us to these moments of disillusionment with ourselves.