Another blogger and "What if?"

I went searching about for blogs again this morning. I do so every once in awhile. And today I found a writer from the blog Effortless Grace. The name intrigued me and that's why I initially clicked on the blog title. I'm not quite to the point of recommending the blog yet, but I wanted to share just a couple of paragraphs I found that really convicted me.

It's from a post entitled "The One Who Comes Alone"

She was a Calvary Evangelical preacher who had been approached undoubtedly weeks before Memorial Day. She had prepared her speech well, incorporating stories to accentuate her points. Then, as she closed, I finally realized what her main topic was. She mentioned something about heroes, and how instead of looking inside of themselves, they look, rather, beyond themselves, and see the people who are touched by the things they do.
She spoke of reaching out to the lonely, the broken hearted, and the “different”. She pondered how in this fantastic age of communication, we could alienate someone so deeply as to make that person think their only means of recourse was to strap a bomb to themselves and blow someone else up. Or how a young man could enter a university building and slay thirty people before sending the final bullet through his brain.
It came to me tonight to ask her this one simple question; Are you a philosopher-academic, or do you have experience in reaching out to the lonely, the rejected? As I stood there this morning I realized for the umpteenth time how many “speeches” I had heard given by people who spend their lives studying what we “ought to do”. I wonder how many of those people ever did what “we ought to do”, or if maybe, just maybe, it was something everyone else ought to do, so we could all learn from her wisdom?

I confess, I'm very guilty of this. I write so often of how things should be when I'm not living that way from day to day myself. I know how things ought to be but that doesn't mean my life is a living example of it. Far from it. I write more from a longing of how I wish to be, than how I am.
Besides convicting me concerning my own shortcomings in that area it also made me wonder. How many preachers, teachers, bloggers, stand up and tell us how it ought to be, when they haven't lived it themselves (and no, Pastor, I'm not making an elusive reference to you). Another blogger recently reminded me in comments on his blog that pastors are sheep as well (I had commented about how dirty sheep are and Christ calling us sheep was no compliment). I have heard a lot of so/so preachers/teachers and read a lot of so/so bloggers (including myself) in my time, and I wonder if some of them/I would be more effective to be speaking about things they're currently walking in. Speaking from experience rather than knowledge. Or it could be my thoughts on it are pointless and most of them are all living out their sermons already. I don't know. I don't even know how I would know. It just made me think.

I've hinted at things like this in my "What If?" posts where it seems like we're all holding back. What would the world be like if we all quit talking about how things ought to be and just simply did them?