This past weekend at Wheaton Academy we held our second annual LEAST event which features our students responding to issues of justice, equality, AIDS, and poverty thru all kinds of various arts mediums and forms...below is the text of my submission this year as I closed this event...it includes a story that has gripped me as I think about how I view, think about, and respond to the needs of the LEAST in every possible arena of life...
As we close LEAST tonight, it is our prayer that you have been moved, been led to a deeper and greater understanding of the incredible work of the God of the Universe in making us, every single one of us, in His image…we are all indeed His workmanship, His best, His beloved, the very ones who He thought so much of that He would offer His Son as a sacrifice, to literally die in our place…
This incredibly powerful truth, this reality that God thinks this much of His created, has come alive for me personally in the most unlikely of places with the most unlikely people from my previous view of life and the world…so tonight I want to tell you a story, a life story of a young lady from Livingstone, Zambia named Josephine…and this story took me way outside my box and brought me more fully into the place where God’s love resides, where there is unity thru God’s Spirit and we no longer have to hide who we are or what we’ve done or where we’ve been because of whose we are in Jesus Christ…
1. I wonder if have you ever met a prostitute before…Not like Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman…maybe more like those who were the bottom of society in Jesus’ day and who were the object of His interest and affection…I met Josephine this past June and heard her story…
2. Josephine’s early life looked like this…
*double orphan at 13 as both parents died from AIDS
*gets married at 14
*gets sick and her husband leaves her and her 3 kids all alone
*what does she do? No jobs, no education…
3. Her life on the streets, trying to make ends meet and somehow provide food and shelter for herself and her children…doing literally the only thing she knew that could bring her resources…selling her body as the one thing that would produce some material worth to make some provision for her kids she desperately loves…and then her husband returns and takes her kids away after years as a prostitute trying to keep them alive…
4. One night, she meets a man named Pastor William and makes her way to a church…she hears that there is a God who loves her, and she struggles with how God can love her when she’s done what she’s done and is doing what she’s doing…
5. But as she enters into the life of the church and into a relationship with a man named Jesus, another man begins to become interested in her---falls in love with her---but she can’t trust him, can’t believe in him---all the other men have treated her in a different way…and her disbelief causes her to run from him…for 2 years…
6. But still, the church doesn’t shun her and she puts her faith and trust in this Jesus who spoke to and had women just like her as some of his closest friends, and showed Himself to a former prostitute first after being resurrected…
7. As she tries to truly believe this radical truth that she was made in God’s image, that Jesus would go to the cross just for her sake, she embraces slowly His dream of a different and new life for her…
8. Something called the Sanduka Project helps her to build a new life, a life where she uses her skills, gifts, and creativity---and she begins to sew, making beautiful, unique African clothes and selling them in the market in Livingstone where she used to sell something else…
9. And she begins to peel away the layers of pain and distrust and gives herself and her heart to a man---which she never thought she’d ever be able to do…
10. And on a beautiful African day she gets married, in a church, with a white dress, and as she walks down the aisle someone who loves her, values her, and believes in her, the one who knows that God has made her to be with him is waiting for her…and everything is so different…
11. This past June I walked into Josephine’s small home/sewing studio…her husband was off teaching at the local school…and with the smell of enshema coming from the kitchen we met her as she showed us her beautiful work…and I had this simple thought…Josephine married someone just like me…and my heart leapt at the thought…
12. And then I heard the cry, the cry of a 4 week old little girl, whose life meant everything in this house and her mom’s new life…the life of a little girl born without HIV, with 2 parents, with hope, and a radically different future…
And as I held that baby I thought of Jesus telling his disciples to let them bring the little ones to Him---this little life is an incredible expression of the story of God’s Kingdom…and that Kingdom belongs to her, to all those like her who are the least…why do we do the Zambia Project?? Why do we put on something called Least?? Because Josephine and 25 other girls in Livingstone along with thousands of children in a village rampaged by AIDS and poverty are begging God to help them get out of a life that they never wanted and to find a love that they have never felt…and this God they are praying to has told us that to be just, to be like Him, we have to do something…they are waiting, God is waiting, for us to embrace Micah 6:8 and watch Him change lives and futures and eternities with great joy because it is His desire for all of those He created to know Him and love Him and experience the fullness of Life His Son left Heaven to bring to earth…may we be image bearers of God as we act justly as we look at the distribution of resources in our world, love to bring mercy to the broken and oppressed, and walk humbly with God as we realize that we share God’s image as the objects of His great love with everyone else He has created…AMEN
Sunday, October 28, 2007
Friday, October 12, 2007
Living with LESS by Chad Hall, Leadership Journal
This past week I was grading papers from my Spiritual Leadership class and many of them were answering on why leaders don't have time to pray...and it almost inevitably went back to this notion that we have more than we need in our lives and the stuff clutters one's days and even faith to the point that communication with our Leader gets lost amidst the managerie of things...and I ran across this article which I affirm as I look at an overcrowded schedule, a seemingly too small pool of resources, and a never ending scratched out to do list in life these days...read and reflect with me...
Everywhere I go these days, big is in. My combo meal is super-sized, my SUV is third row, and the TV of my dreams is 62-inch plasma. We Americans are big eaters, big spenders, and big wasters. Even our churches are into big, owning big malls and even bigger coliseums in order to accommodate big crowds and enable big growth. Like the population at large, we Christians seem to have a growing acceptance of the bigger is better credo.
But all this growth might be creating some big problems.
Our society and systems seem unable of handling the never-ceasing expansion of want and need. Our souls are groaning and the planet is buckling beneath the collateral damage of growth. Landfills are full, the air is thick, and we cannot drink from many of our streams.
In light of our growing problems, maybe the church should give small a chance. I propose that ministry leaders are just the ones to help Christ followers exchange big for small. After all, leaders are supposed to help usher others toward something better (not just something bigger), so maybe we should start ushering folks toward living lives that are less hectic, less cluttered, less selfish and less toxic. And maybe instead of a big ad campaign advertising "LESS!" we should start living with less ourselves. Instead of the pulpit, maybe some personal choices would help slow down the growth, bring some sanity to our lives and make the world more livable.
Give less a chance.
Our family recently decided to sell our riding mower because its impact on the environment was not offset by its necessity. Shortly after, my wife quipped, "I think we're becoming tree-huggers."
How had it come to this? After all, I have a strong dislike of Birkenstocks, I think Michael Moore is a narcissist, and I appreciate creature comforts every bit as much as the next guy. So why is my family choosing to push-mow the lawn, ditch the extra television, and experiment with line-drying our clothes? I'm not sure how it all began or where it's going, but we've adopted a series of small questions that are redirecting our souls and may be benefiting the world around us.
Three small questions
Not to cast blame, but my journey toward less started with Randy Frazee. Prior to a conference in 2003, Randy and I had a dinner conversation during which he shared with me the somewhat radical lifestyle changes his family had made in order to make room for real relationships.
A few months later Randy wrote the book Making Room for Life. When my wife and I read that book, we started talking and eventually began asking the question of simplification, "Even though something is commonplace, do we really need it in our lives?"
With that question in mind, all sorts of things were up for grabs: buying a house in the "right" school district, needing two incomes, cell phones, minivans, and even (hold your breath!) signing our kids up for soccer. It was like a little compact fluorescent light bulb turned on to illuminate some of the chains of conformity we had allowed to make our decisions for us. We began to see how deeply we'd bought into culture's code of success being equated with more and more. The results of all this "more" were clutter and confusion and so we decided to simplify our lives. Removing some of the typical suburban clutter was a bit scary, but over the course of a few years, it really has begun to make room for life.
We soon discovered the joy of having fewer bills to pay, fewer trips to make, fewer calendars to juggle, and fewer agendas to manage. Lurking amidst the resource of free time, we discovered the pleasure of not just having neighbors, but of knowing our neighbors. Our lives soon began to revolve more and more around the half dozen or so families we considered to be our neighbors.
We soon recognized that our role as good neighbors meant significantly other than trying to get someone to attend this or that church. As we experienced the inherent value of people and place, we began to ask, "How can we live so that when Christ returns he won't have to work so hard to redeem our neighborhood?" This became our family's question of significance. We want to add kingdom value to the relational, spiritual and even physical environment we inhabit. Our interactions with neighbors have gone from enjoying their company to co-laboring with them for the good of our little corner of creation. Campfires in the backyard, pizza on Sunday nights, and building a tree house all took on kingdom significance because we were contributing to making things in our acres of earth a little more as they are in heaven.
From significance we took the small step to stewardship. A couple of months ago we picked up a book by medical doctor Matthew Sleeth entitles Serve God, Save the Planet. We've read with wide wonder about the ways his family scaled back their "quality of life" in order to have less impact on the planet. They got rid of their dishwasher and clothes dryer. They traded down to a house the size of their former garage. They produce a small bag of garbage every other week. Wow.
Reading such stories helps us see how a radical lifestyle aligns with living God's way. Now our family is asking the question of stewardship, "Will this choice make the world more like heaven or more like hell?" Our neighborhood of concern has expanded dramatically. Landfills, toxins, and making choices based on our own wants: these are the ingredients of hell. The new heaven and new earth will include none of these things, so why should we add them to this world now? When we choose concern over convenience and less over more, we are being kind to neighbors we have never met and honoring creatures God thought worthy of life.
Go thou and do likewise
I don't think our family is unique. We fight consumerism and selfishness and choices of convenience perhaps more than does the typical family of five. But small realizations are leading to simple questions that force important decisions in our everyday life (including which mower to use). All of this matters not because the environment is suddenly a hot topic, or because we worship Mother Earth, or think our spit will fill the ocean, but because the dots suddenly connect: when I live a gospel life I desire less stuff for myself, which frees up time and space for heavenly community, and this community includes places and people far away and even in the future.
So what does living and leading with less look like for you? What about your congregation? What if those you lead followed your example in removing the clutter, focusing on community and caring for creation? My hunch is that God would be pleased, you would find life more livable and the planet would breath a deep sigh of gratitude.
Everywhere I go these days, big is in. My combo meal is super-sized, my SUV is third row, and the TV of my dreams is 62-inch plasma. We Americans are big eaters, big spenders, and big wasters. Even our churches are into big, owning big malls and even bigger coliseums in order to accommodate big crowds and enable big growth. Like the population at large, we Christians seem to have a growing acceptance of the bigger is better credo.
But all this growth might be creating some big problems.
Our society and systems seem unable of handling the never-ceasing expansion of want and need. Our souls are groaning and the planet is buckling beneath the collateral damage of growth. Landfills are full, the air is thick, and we cannot drink from many of our streams.
In light of our growing problems, maybe the church should give small a chance. I propose that ministry leaders are just the ones to help Christ followers exchange big for small. After all, leaders are supposed to help usher others toward something better (not just something bigger), so maybe we should start ushering folks toward living lives that are less hectic, less cluttered, less selfish and less toxic. And maybe instead of a big ad campaign advertising "LESS!" we should start living with less ourselves. Instead of the pulpit, maybe some personal choices would help slow down the growth, bring some sanity to our lives and make the world more livable.
Give less a chance.
Our family recently decided to sell our riding mower because its impact on the environment was not offset by its necessity. Shortly after, my wife quipped, "I think we're becoming tree-huggers."
How had it come to this? After all, I have a strong dislike of Birkenstocks, I think Michael Moore is a narcissist, and I appreciate creature comforts every bit as much as the next guy. So why is my family choosing to push-mow the lawn, ditch the extra television, and experiment with line-drying our clothes? I'm not sure how it all began or where it's going, but we've adopted a series of small questions that are redirecting our souls and may be benefiting the world around us.
Three small questions
Not to cast blame, but my journey toward less started with Randy Frazee. Prior to a conference in 2003, Randy and I had a dinner conversation during which he shared with me the somewhat radical lifestyle changes his family had made in order to make room for real relationships.
A few months later Randy wrote the book Making Room for Life. When my wife and I read that book, we started talking and eventually began asking the question of simplification, "Even though something is commonplace, do we really need it in our lives?"
With that question in mind, all sorts of things were up for grabs: buying a house in the "right" school district, needing two incomes, cell phones, minivans, and even (hold your breath!) signing our kids up for soccer. It was like a little compact fluorescent light bulb turned on to illuminate some of the chains of conformity we had allowed to make our decisions for us. We began to see how deeply we'd bought into culture's code of success being equated with more and more. The results of all this "more" were clutter and confusion and so we decided to simplify our lives. Removing some of the typical suburban clutter was a bit scary, but over the course of a few years, it really has begun to make room for life.
We soon discovered the joy of having fewer bills to pay, fewer trips to make, fewer calendars to juggle, and fewer agendas to manage. Lurking amidst the resource of free time, we discovered the pleasure of not just having neighbors, but of knowing our neighbors. Our lives soon began to revolve more and more around the half dozen or so families we considered to be our neighbors.
We soon recognized that our role as good neighbors meant significantly other than trying to get someone to attend this or that church. As we experienced the inherent value of people and place, we began to ask, "How can we live so that when Christ returns he won't have to work so hard to redeem our neighborhood?" This became our family's question of significance. We want to add kingdom value to the relational, spiritual and even physical environment we inhabit. Our interactions with neighbors have gone from enjoying their company to co-laboring with them for the good of our little corner of creation. Campfires in the backyard, pizza on Sunday nights, and building a tree house all took on kingdom significance because we were contributing to making things in our acres of earth a little more as they are in heaven.
From significance we took the small step to stewardship. A couple of months ago we picked up a book by medical doctor Matthew Sleeth entitles Serve God, Save the Planet. We've read with wide wonder about the ways his family scaled back their "quality of life" in order to have less impact on the planet. They got rid of their dishwasher and clothes dryer. They traded down to a house the size of their former garage. They produce a small bag of garbage every other week. Wow.
Reading such stories helps us see how a radical lifestyle aligns with living God's way. Now our family is asking the question of stewardship, "Will this choice make the world more like heaven or more like hell?" Our neighborhood of concern has expanded dramatically. Landfills, toxins, and making choices based on our own wants: these are the ingredients of hell. The new heaven and new earth will include none of these things, so why should we add them to this world now? When we choose concern over convenience and less over more, we are being kind to neighbors we have never met and honoring creatures God thought worthy of life.
Go thou and do likewise
I don't think our family is unique. We fight consumerism and selfishness and choices of convenience perhaps more than does the typical family of five. But small realizations are leading to simple questions that force important decisions in our everyday life (including which mower to use). All of this matters not because the environment is suddenly a hot topic, or because we worship Mother Earth, or think our spit will fill the ocean, but because the dots suddenly connect: when I live a gospel life I desire less stuff for myself, which frees up time and space for heavenly community, and this community includes places and people far away and even in the future.
So what does living and leading with less look like for you? What about your congregation? What if those you lead followed your example in removing the clutter, focusing on community and caring for creation? My hunch is that God would be pleased, you would find life more livable and the planet would breath a deep sigh of gratitude.
Tuesday, October 2, 2007
Why We All Must Go On a Pilgrimage by Jeff Goins, RELEVANT MAGAZINE
In many ways, I have seen the incredible value of making a spiritual pilgrimage as this article highlights...to places like the moutains of Colorado and the dirt of Zambia...God has met me and changed me as I have stepped away from life, familiar places, and been spoken to by the Holy Spirit and God's people who live unlike me...may you meet God in pilgrimage as you continue your spiritual journey...
In Through Painted Deserts, Donald Miller opens with the concept of “leaving.” He explains the spiritual importance for him of making a simple move from Texas to Oregon. It opened up a whole new world for him—new places, new perspectives, new people. It made him appreciate going back home so much more. It taught him to not just rely on the familiar—to adapt, grow and change.
At some point in our lives, we all need to leave home.
Recently, I heard a speaker by the name of Andrew Shearman talk on the topic. One morning he was meeting with the father of a missionary who was in Africa, feeding the hungry, healing the sick and so forth. The father was frustrated with the son who had left home on this radical adventure instead of paying off his loans and getting a “real job.”
A few minutes later, the father’s other son came in, equally upset, ranting, “I am so pissed off!”
Andrew asked why.
“Because he’s out there … doing it!” the brother said. “He’s really doing it! And I’m stuck in this office!”
Why was he so upset? “Because he never left home,” Andrew told us.
This recalled a 15-day trip I took to Mexico in January of this year. I was visiting a group of young people who, disenchanted with American church, left for a year-long journey around the world.
Imagine this—50 North Americans willingly selling their possessions and leaving the comfort of their homes in search of abundant life. That’s this group—the World Race—and they’re still out there.
Seth Barnes, founder of the program, describes it as “a commitment to a transformational discovery process. The World Race taps an ancient human compulsion to take a spiritual pilgrimage.” Now, there’s a forgotten practice. At least in western culture, we’ve lost the art of taking some time to go on a journey to figure out what life is really supposed to be about.
We’ve sold our souls to careers tracks and our family name to the burden of college debt. One day, we’re laughing with some friends at an all-night café, cramming for a final exam so we can graduate, and the next, we’re thrust into the real world where everyone is expecting something different us. If we’re not careful, it’s easy to lose our desires amidst all those expectations.
“Most young people have more questions than answers,” Barnes explained. “And what better place to find them than on a pilgrimage.”
The irony of this pilgrimage is that as they go and discover more about themselves, it becomes less about themselves and more about seeking justice and redemption in the world. They’ve rescued women from the sex industry in Thailand, saved orphans from abandonment in Swaziland and planted churches in the Andes Mountains.
Through the hospitality of strangers, they’re learning interdependence, that we all need each other and not one of us has it “all figured out just yet” (to quote Alanis Morisette).
I started making my own mini-pilgrimages about a year ago to downtown Nashville to eat lunch with the homeless. As they tell me their tales, I learn so much about myself—about brokenness and hope. I learn what I really need and how much I can actually do without. I learn that life–real life–has little to do with possessions and mostly to do with people.
I can’t fully express how important it is to leave home. This is not a concept to be debated—it is something tangible to be experienced. Only then is the importance of pilgrimage fully grasped. Once you’ve seen the sun set differently or eaten dinner at an unusual time or faced someone whose lifestyle contradicted your own, then your worldview begins to expand.
This is necessary, if we’re to be the kind of people we’re destined to be. We’re naturally inclined to think that life is mostly about us—our comfort, our stuff, our welfare. We can’t expect our flesh just to “get it”; we’re not that intelligent or that good. We need something to wake us up, jostle us out of bed and set us on a path towards home.
That’s the great irony of this—a pilgrimage, the act of leaving home, actually leads one home, though it is never where one started.
A pilgrim must be a child who can approach everything with an attitude of wonder, awe and faith. Pray for wonder, awe, desire. Ask God to take away your sophistication and cynicism. Ask God to take away the restless, anxious heart of the tourist, which always needs to find the new, the more, the curious …
We go on pilgrimage so we can go back home and know that we never need to go on pilgrimage again. Pilgrimage has achieved its purpose when we can see God in our everyday and ordinary lives. — Richard Rohr
In Through Painted Deserts, Donald Miller opens with the concept of “leaving.” He explains the spiritual importance for him of making a simple move from Texas to Oregon. It opened up a whole new world for him—new places, new perspectives, new people. It made him appreciate going back home so much more. It taught him to not just rely on the familiar—to adapt, grow and change.
At some point in our lives, we all need to leave home.
Recently, I heard a speaker by the name of Andrew Shearman talk on the topic. One morning he was meeting with the father of a missionary who was in Africa, feeding the hungry, healing the sick and so forth. The father was frustrated with the son who had left home on this radical adventure instead of paying off his loans and getting a “real job.”
A few minutes later, the father’s other son came in, equally upset, ranting, “I am so pissed off!”
Andrew asked why.
“Because he’s out there … doing it!” the brother said. “He’s really doing it! And I’m stuck in this office!”
Why was he so upset? “Because he never left home,” Andrew told us.
This recalled a 15-day trip I took to Mexico in January of this year. I was visiting a group of young people who, disenchanted with American church, left for a year-long journey around the world.
Imagine this—50 North Americans willingly selling their possessions and leaving the comfort of their homes in search of abundant life. That’s this group—the World Race—and they’re still out there.
Seth Barnes, founder of the program, describes it as “a commitment to a transformational discovery process. The World Race taps an ancient human compulsion to take a spiritual pilgrimage.” Now, there’s a forgotten practice. At least in western culture, we’ve lost the art of taking some time to go on a journey to figure out what life is really supposed to be about.
We’ve sold our souls to careers tracks and our family name to the burden of college debt. One day, we’re laughing with some friends at an all-night café, cramming for a final exam so we can graduate, and the next, we’re thrust into the real world where everyone is expecting something different us. If we’re not careful, it’s easy to lose our desires amidst all those expectations.
“Most young people have more questions than answers,” Barnes explained. “And what better place to find them than on a pilgrimage.”
The irony of this pilgrimage is that as they go and discover more about themselves, it becomes less about themselves and more about seeking justice and redemption in the world. They’ve rescued women from the sex industry in Thailand, saved orphans from abandonment in Swaziland and planted churches in the Andes Mountains.
Through the hospitality of strangers, they’re learning interdependence, that we all need each other and not one of us has it “all figured out just yet” (to quote Alanis Morisette).
I started making my own mini-pilgrimages about a year ago to downtown Nashville to eat lunch with the homeless. As they tell me their tales, I learn so much about myself—about brokenness and hope. I learn what I really need and how much I can actually do without. I learn that life–real life–has little to do with possessions and mostly to do with people.
I can’t fully express how important it is to leave home. This is not a concept to be debated—it is something tangible to be experienced. Only then is the importance of pilgrimage fully grasped. Once you’ve seen the sun set differently or eaten dinner at an unusual time or faced someone whose lifestyle contradicted your own, then your worldview begins to expand.
This is necessary, if we’re to be the kind of people we’re destined to be. We’re naturally inclined to think that life is mostly about us—our comfort, our stuff, our welfare. We can’t expect our flesh just to “get it”; we’re not that intelligent or that good. We need something to wake us up, jostle us out of bed and set us on a path towards home.
That’s the great irony of this—a pilgrimage, the act of leaving home, actually leads one home, though it is never where one started.
A pilgrim must be a child who can approach everything with an attitude of wonder, awe and faith. Pray for wonder, awe, desire. Ask God to take away your sophistication and cynicism. Ask God to take away the restless, anxious heart of the tourist, which always needs to find the new, the more, the curious …
We go on pilgrimage so we can go back home and know that we never need to go on pilgrimage again. Pilgrimage has achieved its purpose when we can see God in our everyday and ordinary lives. — Richard Rohr
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