Dear brother Rowland, It has been far too long since I wrote to you and thanked you for the repeated blessings that the excerpts from your writings has provided me through the Clergy/Leaders' Mail-list. Bless you for your work. I wanted to take the slightest exception to the excerpt in Clergy/Leaders' Mail-list No. 1-133, a piece entitled "TRUE BEAUTY". Your final exhortation is a brief prayer, "Jesus, you believe I am beautiful. Convince me to agree with you!" I think that this sentiment lacks biblical collateral. Clearly, people with injured self-esteem or pathological self-deprecation need the kind of restorative that you suggest. And there IS a kind of beauty that we should see in people who lack the exterior beauty that our culture respects, indeed worships. But in general, we need more than anything to see the beauty of Jesus Himself and not to be completely blind to the ugliness of our own sin or the deformity of our own unregenerate persons. The cultural dogma that we are without sin is one of the most crippling and blinding influences that afflict my peers. And it seems to me that your excerpt glosses over that fact and seems to give some comfort to this prevailing view. Of course, this is the difficulty with excerpts, that they frequently damage a writer's message by taken a small part out of its orignal and intended context. How well I know! If I have misjudged, please forgive me. By the way, I ran into a friend of yours in Nassau last month. As you know, the US Episcopal Church is in the process of tearing itself apart. Abp. Harry Goodhew was in Nassau for a consultation on this subject, and since Australia is such a small country(!), I ventured to ask him if he knew you. He said yes and asked to be remembered to you when next I wrote to you. He also mentioned that you began your ministry (if I remember him right) in the Anglican Church. Blessings to you, brother, and thank you for sharing your great store of wisdom with us. In Christ, Bob

Robert McAnally Adams, Curator, Christian Quotation of the Day http://www.gospelcom.net/cqod

Hi Bob

Thanks for your most interesting email...

I agree with you: in a sermon on this subject I take more words to define what kind of 'beauty' I am talking about...

IOW we need to he-Hollywoodize the concept, and make it synonymous with 'inherent worth'

Rowland Croucher