God has ordered the world in such a way that even his greatest miracles don’t usually happen without human collaboration. The Bible didn’t drop down from the clouds; it was passed down in oral and written for by people who could have gone home instead and lain down on the couch. Babies don’t show up at our door; a man and a woman come together and become cocreators with God. The Good Samaritan who went out of his way to console his downtrodden neighbor was Jesus’s preferred social justice strategy—an individual taking personal responsibility to do the right thing. And then, finally, there’s God’s choice to attach salvation to our faith, that mysteriously free, simple complicated, misty gift from God by which we are saved.
—from God Wants You Happy by Father Jonathan Morris, Ch. 1: Junior Partners of the Holy Spirit