Striving, or not

For more commentary on this week's readings, see the Reflections on the Lectionary page, which includes Oglesbee's current Living by the Word column as well as past magazine and blog content. For full-text access to all articles, subscribe to the Century.

Texts about "striving" make me itch. They bring to mind our own cultural commitments to speak about lifting ourselves by our own bootstraps to reach high goals.

We like the talk, but we've also learned to approach it with the same wariness we bring to New Year's resolutions. Sometimes it's more a party game than a decision. We excitedly scrawl our new congregational mission plans on napkins, notebooks or iPads, and then we wonder what we were thinking when our best plans and resolutions don't take flight--like the winged, but apparently flightless, old man in Gabriel Garcia Marquez's A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings.