we were born for this

1.11.2011

President Jimmy Carter declared that the most pivotal catastrophe of the millenium is the growing chasm between the rich and the poor world wide. When 1 in 2 people lives on less than $2 a day, it makes the privileged "world" we are familiar with actually pretty small, eh?

the more i live, the more I get lost in the numbers of this world. you ever feel that way? there's a lot goin on with 6 billion people milling around all over the place. whenever i get a bright idea for myself, i get exhausted just imagining how i will stand out in a crowd that size (hey, we can't all be Taylor Swifts, ya know?). But there is one direction that is failproof... when I direct my energy towards helping those that can't help themselves.

whether you associate yourself with Jesus Christ and Christianity or not, the Bible is a fantastic read, but I'm gonna break it down for you: love God, love your neighbor, thats it. Jesus surrendered his immortality to live with us in our world and demonstrate just that- he encouraged us- GO and do likewise.

we have shining moments where love prospers (after tragedies primarily- but how ironic is that, it takes a something terrible to spur love?). One day a jet liner crashes... wait scratch that, if 100 jetliners crashed and 26,000 people were killed, the media would be all over it and we would all be forced to reflect and reassess our perspective toward life and others that day. But we get back to our own daily grind pretty quickly. Well, what if I told you its a fact that 26,575 CHILDREN die every day from poverty related causes. WHAT- How are we allowing that to happen EVERY day? That we don't treat this as an emergency-that's our crisis, but we don't, because they aren't oUr kids.
but our biggest mistake towards each other must be that we are indifferent to one another. Don't depersonalize the millions of faces of poverty.

"if you...spend yourselves on behalf of the hungry and satisfy the needs of the oppressed, then your light will rise in the darkness and your night will be like the noonday." isaiah 58:9-10

we were born for this, its not the government's job, its not the 'called's job, God asked us all, we should be the first responder to love.

the hole in the gospel by richard stearns is a read worth your time

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

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