The Church as the bride of Christ doesn’t always seem very beautiful. It’s messy there are factions with personal agendas, there are people with emotinal scars, there are people that don’t exactly have the same values as you, there are people who are mentally not with it. It doesn’t always seem like a place you would want to go, and that is what makes it so vital. Most of the time we try to choose what happens in out life, we try choose our friends, our job, our spouse, etc, etc. We tend to choose people and situations that we like, that are easy. But a healthy church isn’t always easy, it has people we don’t like. It forces us to do things we don’t want to do. I was talking with a hindu friend and he was talking about how as humans we have a tendancy to isolate ourselves. Virtual experiences, where we don’t have to deal with things we don’t like. This is one more area that the church has the ablity to speak, for at it’s core is realationship. The relationship between God and man and out of that we learn how to relate to others. And that relationship is beautiful.