It's Friday afternoon break, and we just heard from Erwin McManus of Mosaic Church in California. His presentation was a call for us to embrace our humanity and live authentically. I loved his view of history--God taking tragedy and shaping it into beauty. Some of Erwin's soundbytes are below: We have an improper perspective of our role in the creative process. We are called by God and placed here by God to create the future. We're trying so hard not to infringe into God's sovereign space that we sit passively by until the future happens to us and we must respond to it. The human spirit cannot live in falsehood. We are designed to live in truth. Our souls long for the authentic and the real. Perhaps human history is a conflict between tragedy and beauty. Through human history, God is taking all the tragedy, brokenness, tears, loneliness, and garbage, and creating something beautiful with it. What the world needs for us is not great sermons or brilliant messages, they need us to take them to a place they cannot go without us. We have been with God, and we can take them there. They need someone that can take the tragedy of life and teach them how God is weaving his story in their lives.