against all hope

{11.19.2010}

Do you remember the holocaust of WWII? I remember freaking out in history class, that it took us (america) so long to intervene and stop such corrupt twisted behavior. How can so many people be killed and it go unnoticed? You can't pretend that kinda stuff is not happening and look the other way.

For so long I also maintained the assumption that Nazi Germany and their concentration camps were a one time tragic event against one people group... such an ignorant thought. Holocausts and genocide still plague our world. Struggles against severe cultural prejudice still leave bodies in heaps and piles, or worse, surviving people are subject to prisoners of the most dehumanizing acts.

Genocide in Burma has left hundreds of thousands of refugees to flee to jungles and across borders to Thailand and other neighboring countries (some even to America with the help of World Vision, my parents even adopted a Burmese family).

Hope keeps these desperate people alive. Aid from struggling organizations and missions might sustain them a little longer. The people that are not eliminated are sold as commodities, many of them as factory and field workers, and many, many more into the sex industries of Thailand, Cambodia, and elsewhere.

I have such a hopeless feeling myself, but the relentless smiles and struggle for survival that these people possess draw me toward their redemption. Not to mention, what kind of people are we if we just look away?

Against all hope,

Abraham believed...

Deciding to live not on the basis of what he saw he couldn't do.

But on what God said he would do.

romans 4:8 (NIV & The Message).

I am going in January, I want to be a voice for the people that have none...

**these photos are not mine

24 years

{11.8.2010}

24 Years of hard walking and calloused eyes

unforgiving pavement haunted by the echoes of refrains come and gone, decoratively concealed with a managed ficticious perfectly practiced smile.

24 Years of writing and rewriting

definitions assigned by ineligible authors, input rendering life and death, authoring reality for yet another purposed life

24 Years of chasing sunsets

incessantly fading, tripping on an oblivion of treadmills in search of approval, groping around a perplexity of fallacy

24 Years of stop and go sprints

to launch this kite off into an airstream of freedom, to be weightless, and float on the soft swells of clouds straining against the single string holding it prisoner to earth.

But

24 years brought a new emancipation

hidden in the yellow and orange October woods of Georgia, a dawn treading dance that neither looked to the left or to the right for steely cold stares or nods of validation

24 years glanced over her shoulders, just for a second

and laughed at the rebellion of 19 and cried at self hatred and abuse of 16, 24 clung to the broken 22 and smiled at the innocence of 10.

24 held a box over her head

and hurled it to the ground with a choked laugh of hysteria, a freedom anthem 24 in the sky with diamonds and a pocket full of songs and new found liberty.

24 squinted against new boundless boundaries

pressures, expectations, rules, sizes, carbohydrates, and other restraining taboos flew out the window into the shrapnel of a 100 wars.

24 flew a new flag

of discovery, of questions, of intimacy, of self discovery and gratitude, all under the umbrella of one love, a creator holding the hand of a child walking into her destiny.

☮ ☮ ☮

i dare someone to write a pop song about this

Hey guess what- you want it? You got it. You feel it? Then do it. You crave it. Consume it. Follow your heart- go crazy. You deserve it! (sarcasm font).

Here's a thought: everything is permissible for me but not everything is beneficial (Paul in the Bible was the original writ).

Self denial allows you to dip into the spiritual and the spiritual might just be more fulfilling than all that s#@t you think is gonna change the way you feel.

Day 18 of a 21 day fast

why don't we fast more...

Jesus demonstrated the good life, we should try it more often

original love story

I love PDA. And all of these photos are the sweetest. But Frank Viola writes: "Yet the most powerful love story that any human has ever crafted pales in comparison to the epic romance that runs throughout your bible."

Put that Twilight poster awayyy, Jacob hasn't even survived his teens yet (acne is bound to strike), oh and fahgetabout The Notebook, turns out Allie didn't really have Alzheimers, she and Noah just fought so much in their marriage she was trying to block it out. BUT the ancient publication we call the bible contains an allegory running so severely and drastically deep concealing a dam of meaning, that tragically many will never understand it.

ok, so i am not THAT much of a skeptic, there really are lovely stories of people madly in love and absolutely committed to each other, but even these situations are merely an attempt of us, the created, to imitate what God our creator has played out before us and innately planted desire to love in our souls. Imagine that every plot of every romantic scenario is really just the human endeavor to display what we believe and feel, but is really just a pale shadow of what God is spotlighting throughout all of history.

Not a single word in the bible goes to waste. Every letter of every chapter is allegorical. Consider the introduction of Eve into the world. Eve was brought forth from Adam's side. Parallel this with the church (often referred to as the bride) within Christ. This would bring a whole new meaning to how Adam was "put to sleep" when Eve was created, and then how Christ was stabbed in the side by the Roman Centurian in his final fateful moments on the executionary cross and then was dead for 3 days. It was after Jesus was killed that the church came forth.

From Jesus' sacrificial death to you finishing reading this sentence, there is a story God has entangled through history of his pursuit of us, his creation and object of love. God is perfectly adequate within Himself. But because God is love, He is not content to be adequate in Himself. And because He loves us totally, He gives us the free will to choose to love Him back, or not. But this poses the question: why would we not choose Him?

civilize this

"Christianity over the past 2000 years has moved from a tribe of renegades to a religion of conformists... Jesus is being lost in a religion bearing his name. People are being lost because they cannot reconcile Jesus' association with Christianity. Christianity has become docile, domesticated, civilized."

-erwin McManus

When I think about Jesus, or Paul, or Simon Peter I picture like an Indiana Jones character trotting the ancient world making politicians look like doofuses, rich people and their roman coins utterly useless, and the rest of society admire their mysterious gusto enough to follow them around like groupies or paparazzi, US weekly style. How far have Christ followers drifted from this movement 2000 years later?

The modern religious conformist makes me sick, maybe because sometimes I feel myself slipping into that ra-tard sloth pattern of a comatose Christian sometimes. UGH. We do live in a different world but everyday can be just as much as a mission trip as Paul getting ship wrecked in the mediterranean in the early AD days. People are tripping around this place all around us in a desperate cloud of self remedy for the gaping hole in their soul for sOMEthing, anything, to suffice and carry them into the next day or week. They don't know what they are missing if they haven't experienced it.

BUT maybe YOU have. I know I have and yet I am often too scared to offend someone, or immediately get written off as one of those marshmallow Christians who dramatically coughs when someone lights a stog, or is desperate to hunt down a husband and have sheltered home-schooled kids, or wince at a four letter word or the idea of a sleeve and body piercings. But you know what Jesus said?

"blessed is the man who does not fall away on account of me (matt 11:6)"

Jesus spoke these words to John the Baptist when he was in prison about to get beheaded for scouring the streets and spreading the word that Jesus was that hero the people were looking for. The solution to all their political, religious, and spiritual strife. But Jesus basically told John, while you are in prison about to die, I am healing the sick, giving sight to the blind, making parapalegics dance, and I'm not rescuing you from prison. Jesus was like, I have a diff plan for your life, hopefully this will not sway your faith in me, thank you for your life of service and following your barbarian call.

Jesus' purpose was not to save us from pain and suffering, but from MEANINGLESSNESS.

What are you doing to not live a meaningless docile life??

Matt 10:16, we are called to live in this world as citizens of another kingdom and jesus never said it would be easy.

I want to be

how very avant garde

you are my microphone

{6.3.2010}

I might over-examine things. Actually I do. Not in a bad way, more in a soaking wet with curiosity kind of way. For instance, I know we have this thing called culture. Its just how we do things. But how do we simply walk into it and adapt to its waters and never question it?

So, I'm talking to my friend Twohill yesterday and we were laughing at how people will dish out millions of dollars for little animals (we love animals too bear with me haters). Like there was an animal rescue org in CA that had this huge campaign to nurture some little seal. They raised millions of dollars to concoct the creature a specific comfortable aquatic sanctuary, nurse it and harbor it. After some time, the organization sponsored an enormous local event where they were going to launch this million dollar stock investment back into the wild. Animal obsessive enthusiasts came from all over to cheer this little blubber nugget on its way out into the vast primeval oceanic jungle. Not five minutes after the beastie gyrated its ways through the Pacific layers, a monstrous killer whale swooped in outta no where and intercepted the seal into its destined killer jaw cage. All of the hard earned "American Dream" dollars lobbied for the support of this animal chunk were swallowed into oblivion without so much as a drop of ketchup.

All that extensive tale to question, what is wrongggg with people in our culture that we are so quick to pump extra cash into the unnecessary care of wild animals while at the same time there are people that are desperately fighting to barely survive life in this world.

We feel so accomplished when we support a child by donating a few bucks a month or tossing some change in the orphan bucket on our way through the grocery line, but how is our culture NOT in a state of EMERGENCY based on the catastrophic imbalance of life, love, and the pursuit of happiness (fahget about prosperity!). Our culture is so egocentric, how do we even sleep at night on our perfect tempurpedic mattresses (where a chick can jump up and down on it and the dude's glass of wine doesn't spill) when there are places in the world where 30 kids sleep on a floor in a one bedroom house with no mother to tuck them in or no promise of breakfast in the morning and the constant fear of being trafficked because their life has little to no value. WHAT kind of a culture are we living in? Who do we think we are?

I know that people are drowning in our culture. I know that people are numb. I know that my emotion might not jump off this screen into your heart or soul. I know that these paragraphs might even be too long to even hold your short attention span. But if nothing else, please examine our culture... your reality, and expand your perspective outside your excessive comfort and feel a little less comfortable knowing that there are cycles of unnecessary evil in the world and you can do something to end their perpetuation.