Ann Voskamp's Blog, page 295

10 Real Ways You Could Really Be the Change in the World

In the days after, my throat about seals off.

On the edge of the bed in the dark before morning, all I can do is is sit at the edge of the world and close my eyes, wince through every hard searing.

It hurts and it doesn’t matter because there’s no getting around it — you do have to figure a way out to swallow the world down.

They had said this would happen — that moving from Haiti’s furnace heat and sweat-sticking t-shirts, into air-conditioned goosebump cold, that we could get sick.

But is this sick or the truest well and why should we swallow the world down without pain? It’s Haiti’s furnace heat that’s gotten right into me, that’s burning up my throat, that’s searing all my words, that’s making my words still and know that He is God.

I don’t know how many containers of raspberries I’ve eaten.

That I’ve found in the back of the fridge and placed one at a time, these fresh, cool jewels, right on the tongue — then swallowed them down, cold extinguishing for everything aflame inside. When I find out at 4:32 am on Thursday that there are no more berries in the fridge, I wonder if the point is that I should stop trying to extinguish anything. Who isn’t a dead man unless there is fire in his bones?

Who isn’t nothing but a skeleton in the valley of the dry bones — unless they actually pull some skin onto the Word and let suffering make your valleys into sheltered places to light a match and see the face of God.

Who really has faith in their heart if they don’t have fire in their bones?

And anyone who has His fire in their bones isn’t really safe. Open Flames are always dangerous.

At 4:47 am, I grab a pen and try to make a plan.

Because people with fire in their bones might ignite change:

1. Pray.

This is doing something — the first thing.

Prayer isn’t a substitute for action — prayer is the source of action. Pick a country to pray for, a person, a people group — make it a habit of your day to wear compassion and justice and prayer.

 

2. Make it your goal to tithe 10%

The Average American? Gives 3.2% of their income. And if every committed Christian in America tithed 10% from whatever their income is — we’d give $85 billion dollars a year. And the United Nations states the world only needs $30 billion dollars a year to end world hunger.

 

3. Give Wisely

When giving, Tim Keller says, the most effect way to make to change is to support:

Straight Relief = immediate aid

Societal Development= entrepreneurial support, business, educational, health and infrastructure development.

Soul Reform = evangelism and discipleship.

“There is no better way for Christians to lay a foundation for evangelism than doing justice,” write Keller. “On paper we may ask, ‘Should Christians do evangelism or social justice?’ But in real life, these things go together,” offers Keller.

 

4. Be a Moses Christian: Stay with your kindred.

Do whatever it takes to stay with the poor: around the corner, across town, around the world. Make it your lifestyle to live face to face with the needy on a regular basis, because this is a way to stay face to face with Christ. Stock shelves at a food bank, serve at a soup kitchen, visit a nursing home, be a Big Brother or Sister, read mission blogs, become an advocate, write a child, visit a prison, make friends with one person who is in dire straits.

 

5. Sponsor a child

Give up one thing (coffee? cable? take-out?) and reach for a child!

Does sponsoring a child make any REAL difference?

What Christianity Today wrote in it’s report:

Two researchers and I recently carried out a study (sponsored by the U.S. Agency for International Development) on the long-term impacts of Compassion International’s child sponsorship program.

The study, gathering data from over 10,000 individuals in six countries, found substantial impact on adult life outcomes for children who were sponsored through Compassion’s program during the 1980s and ’90s. We statistically compared formerly sponsored children to older siblings who were too old for sponsorship when the program started in their village.

In adulthood, formerly sponsored children were far more likely to complete secondary school and had a much higher chance of having a white-collar job. They married and had children later in life, were more likely to be church and community leaders, were less likely to live in a home with a dirt floor and more likely to live in a home with electricity.

Figure out how you, even as extended family or with friends or with your children, might sponsor one child.

 

6. Buy Wisely

Use your purchasing power to help the poor: buy your clothes only from companies that benefit those making the clothes, improving their lives. Be like Job and wear justice.

 

7. Make it Christmas in July!

Middle of July is the perfect time to consider how your Christmas could radically, really change the world. Isn’t that why Christ came? And who’s birthday is it anyways and Who do we really want to give to? When Your Christmas gets Radical…

 

8. When You gave a Glass of Water…

One million children die from drinking unclean water each year. That’s 114 children before the next hour is up – just because they drank dirty water. And for the cost of dinner out or a nice birthday present — just $55.00 — you could give 68 people clean drinking water for their entire lives.

Let everyone know today: Your new standard wish-list for your birthday: Clean drinking water. And then bake yourself a cake and smile big when you blow the candles out — because nothing can extinguish that fire in your bones!

 

9. Net Wisely

Count to 45. A child just died of malaria. “Malaria is a leading killer of children in developing countries, accounting for nearly one in five deaths of children under age 5 in sub-Saharan Africa.” But for $12? You can provide a net that can save a life. How long might it take to save up $12 to donate?

 

10. Do Something

Don’t let anything keep you from doing just one thing today — because you just don’t think it’s a big enough thing.

Anything is better than nothing and if everyone does something — we’re a lot closer to getting everything done.

 

I had read it in the days after I came home from Haiti — read it when my throat hurt and I couldn’t seem to find my voice. And I had fallen asleep and dreamed it — seen it as clear a movie reel running on the screen of my life:

There’s all these women, all of us, sitting around a pond on a Sunday afternoon, and we’re eating egg salad and sipping lemonade and talking about our kids and grace and walking with Christ and wiggling our bare toes in the sun.

And then someone heard it — the flailing splashes, the screaming. Someone stands and points — 10 small toddlers have fallen into the pond!

The children are drowning — children with the faces of our children.

The pond might be cold, we might get our skirts wet — even dirty – but should anything keep us from rescuing a child? If, for the cost of a new skirt — we could save a child — shouldn’t we?

There is no hesitation — there is running and there is reaching out and there are the hands and feet of Christ in this world.

And we each save one gloriously exquisite child— each with the face of our child. But up on the grass? There are some women who can’t wade right now — who can’t get dirty today.

And there’s a child right beside you drowning – with your face. Who says they’ve done enough?

Who says someone else should now do something?

And then I see all these arms —

how they reach out and save. one. more. child.

And on the edge of the bed in the dark before morning — I wake up and my throat is scorching sore and it’s not strep throat — but struck throat.

Struck by grace and poverty and beauty and the gift of Christ who carves away all these things to make a life into a gift to be given back.

Who burns all this dross away.

You don’t look into the lives of the poor and plead the 5th amendment — your life is always your answer.

And with this sore throat, I need no words…

just hands and feet and a heart to act.

 

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Related Post: The 1 Thing You Really Know About Your FamilyClick here to download a free Easter Devotional : A Trail to the Tree {please give it a few moments to download… thank you for grace!}

The 1 Thing You Really have to Know About Your Family

Iam not going to lie.

When your kin comes knocking on your own back door — come to ask how that trip to Haiti went — how can you look them in the eye and lie?

How can you lie still when babies are drowning in a sea of poverty?

How can you not scream?

I tell Mama that I think I’m angry.

Mama sits down.

And I pace, this hunting for words for the indescribable. And it comes out haltingly, that I think if I open my mouth, it will come right out, this roar. This inhumane, howling moan that only the Spirit can make any sense of…

Angry? She says.

And there’s no holding this tattered roar back.

I’m angry at sin that smothers children and selfishness that steals human dignity and apathy that infects the hearts of the comfortable. And I pound my own chest.

I’m angry at me.

Angry at how much I want comfortable more than I want Christ.



Angry at how much I want to forget that grimy boy leaned over a garbage heap, wiping his fingers along the inside of food tray, looking for anything left. I’m wildly angry that I want to forget the struggle of the poor so I can pin the next pretty idea on Pinterest.

I’m angry that I’ve seen and I’m ashamed that I am angry and I’m angry that I’ve seen and now I am responsible. More than respons-able – we’re response-bound. Once we have seen the poor, we are responsible — we will make a response. As long as your heart is beating, there’s no such thing as unresponsive. We all look into the face of the poor and it’s either Yes, I will help. Or no, I won’t.

There’s no getting off the hook.

Faith cannot have a non-response.

We’re either responding with indifference or with intercession, either with apathy or aid.

You can’t look into the face of the poor and just plead the fifth amendment. Your life is always your answer.

I feel sick that I feel so angry.

Sick that I want to Pin with abandon, that I don’t want to be a witness, that I want someone else be an uncomfortable voice for the poor. Sick that six weeks from now I can grow cold and forget. I have.

Why do Christians make their lives tell all these half-truths?

On Tuesday, when I wake up on the farm, my throat is sore. I feel like I’ve lost my voice. I feel like my heart is sore.

What do you say in the face of disparity that defies words?

It’s 708 miles from Port Au Prince, Haiti to Miami, Florida – less distance than the length of the state of Texas.

From a city with no sewer system — where every night workers scoop out latrines with buckets and dump the sewage of it’s 3 million into open, garbage choked ditches cutting through the city – to not only what Forbes named the cleanest city, but the richest city in the United States of America.

The flight isn’t an hour and a half. In ninety minutes, taxing down the runway, we leave the tarped and twigged shacks of people earning less than $750 a year — to suburban McMansions where the average family earns $52,000.

How long can you walk around feeling like you have whiplash? Is heart whiplash what you need to wake your heart up?

Why would we rather turn a blind eye to the needy than turn to the needy and be like Christ? Do we like our own wants and comfort more than we want to be like Christ?

When I walked behind Wesley, I couldn’t stop watching the way his arms move.

How they look like these starved, breakable sticks, these bones with brown skin stretched over tight.

It’s his head I wanted into, that shaved close head and everything behind those huge sunken eyes. What’s Wesley thinking?

What does it feel like to walk ahead of 5 milk white foreigners, walk them through heaps of burnt out scrapped metal, past an open latrine, to your dark windowless house that wouldn’t be 100 square feet?

When Wesley’s Grandfather’s brings the cow into the yard, his shorts are tied up with string. If the body of Christ is tied together with His blood, how does His family live estranged – like the generous giving of grace is strange?

Wesley shows us his Bible. He’s standing in the doorway of the shack he lives in with his mother, his Grandfather.

Wesley’s mother, she says that Wesley’s father lives that way – the mother points — lives in other places with his other wives. She points back into the darkened door, the hard floor. Sometimes he comes here to spend a night. She says it all quiet, says it like there’s not much of her left, like she’s the one spent. It doesn’t look like she has a handful of teeth.

I gently lay a hand on Wesley’s shoulder, on my brother’s shoulder, ask if he’d like to share with us his favorite Bible verse? Wesley stares at a page. Wesley can’t read. He is 12 and he can’t read. Who has words for this?



He does have a Compassion sponsor. He hands me their letter.

Attached is a picture of a couple smiling happy in Central Park. Wesley’s standing barefoot and wordless in front of a windowless shack with a photo of folks hugging happy in Central Park and how can we help where we are born in this world? This soundless howl pounds in my ears.

Where is the Spirit who interprets all these impossible groans? What is the solution to poverty in this world? What in the world do we all do?

The day we go to the ocean to meet Jonelson, one of the children we sponsor in Haiti through Compassion, he hugs Caleb. He lives on a tropical island, but Jonelson’s never been to the ocean before. His mother’s trying to feed eight children in a one room house with no running water, no electricity and not much more than $30 a month for them all to figure out how to live, how to scrape something out of the earth.

Jonelson’s mother strips him down to his thin white underwear and he stands there at the water’s edge not knowing what to do. Drilling his one big toe nervous into the sand.

Caleb digs in his bag for that swimsuit he brought for Jonelson. His mother pulls them up over Jonelson’s skivvies.

And when Caleb kneels down in front of Jonelson, to try to beckon him out into the water, the boy climbs up on Caleb’s back.

Caleb wades deeper into all that tropical aqua and Jonelson holds on. I stand beside Jonelson’s mother and we’re two mothers watching our two sons carrying each other, holding on to each other, arms and feet entwined and we’re family and aren’t we all entangled by something?

Are we entangled in Christ and loving His family or are we entangled in culture and its pressures to have all of its stuff?

When we say goodbye to Joneslon, tears stream down his mother’s face. She cups my face in her hands and kisses me on the cheek like a sister.

She puts a grass woven hat on my head and all I can think of is Job saying “justice was my robe and turban” (Job 29:14). In the family of Christ, we wear justice for the poor. In the Body of Christ, our lives should be clothed in caring like our bodies are covered in clothing.

Caleb had packed it – this Canadian t-shirt. He’d given one to little Jonelson. And he’d said it when we’d crawled through the swarming streets of Port Au Prince. He’d looked out on the open latrines and the shacks and the wandering children and he had said it way too loud.

Said it too loud just after the bus engine finally gasped quiet in the heat.

“Sure am glad I wasn’t born in a place like this – glad I was born in the land of the strong and free.”

And I hissed shhhhhh.

But for days that’s what kept echoing – no, shouting — in my head: “It’s by and large where you are born.” What would your life look like if you were born onto the heaving streets of Port Au Prince instead of all that clean air somewhere west of Central Park?

If you were born onto dirt and mud in the tarped cities of Haiti instead of the windows and water and wealth of the Western world?

You can turn a blind eye to the poor all you want but it could have turned out that you were the poor.

And when our Haitian Compassion translator, Johnny, stands at The Alpha Hotel with its rats running down the hallways, he tells us how, after getting his BA in Florida, he’d got his MDiv in North Carolina –

How he’d come back to Haiti to work for Compassion, and took in 5 starving Haitian orphans to raise with his own 3 and saved to send all 8 of them to university.

How he’d walked out of the Hotel Montana not 30 seconds before it collapsed in the earthquake and how after the quake, how he’d climbed from one tree to the next, all down the mountain from the Montana, all the roads blocked with rubble and death, wild to find his kids and wife somewhere in Port Au Prince that is home.

And that’s when I couldn’t stop it – when it came out of me, a whisper, but still too loud.

Like an angry fool, I had asked him, laid my hand on his arm and quietly begged him, “Jonny, I know you were born here – but someday — couldn’t you take your family and move to a land like the States?”

Just step over the rubble and beggars and latrines and garbage and gangs and just get your family out of this place where you were born and come find the land of the free? It’s ugly, but it’s the truth and what I thought for our friend:  You only get one life and who really wants to spend it in the slums?

And he looked me in the eyes and he waited, searching mine.

Searching for a way to get the truth right into me, me born into the lap of ease of the West and homesick for the farm and wanting everyone to have the relative ease of the middle class.

“But I am Moses.” Johnny speaks it deep, his eyes never leaving mine, his fatherly hand gently squeezing mine, soothing out my roaring wail.

“I am Moses. I do not leave my kindred.”

And the whole planet and all my heart reverberates.

I am Moses. I do not leave my kindred.

You don’t leave your kin to save your own skin.

You don’t stay in the palace if you want anybody to find deliverance – especially yourself.

You don’t forget who your brother is — when you know Who your Father is.

I turn away, chin quaking hard. I’ve got a passport in my bag and a ticket to ease and he only gets one life here and he’s living in the desperate need of this one for the definite reward of the next one – and how in the world again am I living mine?



If the grace of my life is mostly where I am born, and I am born into the family of Christ, than how can my life birth anything other than a grace that gives?

I read it just before my plane lifts from Haitian soil, read it standing in a line in the chaotic Port Au Prince airport, what Tim Keller wrote:

“It is due to the century and place in which you were born, to your talents and capacities and health, none of which you earned.

In short, all your resources are in the end — the gift of God.”

Forget Paris. It’s what I found right here in Haiti: It’s all in the end a gift and a gift never stop being a gift, always meant to be given, and it’s all by His grace alone and I bend my stiff neck in Port Au Prince and I’m wrecked and everything gives way.

Why do good things happen to people who happen to take all that good for granted?

Why can I read and Wesley can’t, and why do I have the privilege of not worrying where the next meal is coming from and Jonelson’s mother doesn’t?

And why do I fly home to running water in Canada and Johnny stays here pumping a country for hope and why do the three million of Port Au Prince carry buckets of sewage and why do we have a house of 8 with not one toilet but an obscene four?

I am so angry and so much at me.

When you are born again into the Kingdom of God, how can you ever again forget your kin? Part of the solution to poverty is doing whatever it takes to get your heart to stay with the poor.

There may be miles between the rich and the poor, but how can there be distance in the family of God.

And my mama, my kin —

she reaches over and the world seems small and she squeezes my hand close.

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And hath made of one blood all nations of men …

Acts 17:26

For deeper reflection: How to Make your Life an Endless Celebration

{If you’d like to stay with your kindred, consider sponsoring a child through Compassion USA or Compassion in Canada?}

Click here to download a free Easter Devotional : A Trail to the Tree {please give it a few moments to download… thank you for grace!}

weekends are for the best worship

Coming to you live from our drive through Port Au Prince this morning….

{Please consider clicking off music slider just below top nav bar to hear the best kind of worship — right in the midst. RSS readers can view video here… }

and what song’s on repeat in my heart

Caleb and sweet Kechnaider who needs a sponsor {b: June 25, 2008)…

Cale hanging with his new Haitian buddies, Loveson {b: May 18, 2007}, Dieunelson {b: Sept. 16, 2008} and Juvens {born Christmas Day, 2007} –  all needing sponsors… 

Only one extraordinary link this Saturday for your weekend inspiration…

 the Link/Connection that’s happening hard in my heart:

“Suppose a brother or sister is without clothes and daily food.

If one of you says, “Go, I wish you well; keep warm and well fed,” but does nothing about his physical needs, what good is it?

In the same way, faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead.”

~ James 2:15-17

Caleb and I met this quartet of amazing boys this week in Haiti. Captured our hearts, they did!

And Kechnaider, Loveson, Dieunelson, and Juvens — they don’t have sponsors through Compassion. And they need them.

Will you make it Christmas in July? Come be a part of of the our Haiti story this week?

Together, you, Caleb, all of us — we can be part of each other’s story — and be part of the hope of Christ for Haiti!

If you’d like to make it Christmas in July and sponsor Kechnaider, Loveson, Dieunelson, or Juvens through Compassion International (for 38-41$/mo [USD/CDN]) — would you email me at annvoskampholyexperience@gmail.com? {and let us know your country of residence, please?} And Caleb and I will connect your hearts with these 4 future men we met… We can’t ever thank you enough for being the difference in Jesus’ name!}

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:Click here to download a free Easter Devotional : A Trail to the Tree {please give it a few moments to download… thank you for grace!}

When You are Looking For Hope

‘If there are hopeless places — Haiti is almost a hopeless place.”

That’s what the guy in jeans and the stamped up passport had told us before we went anyways.

On a street to the south, a man bent and twisted by struggle and sun, he slugs a shovel load of rubble high up into a dump truck.

Mounds of charcoal, flip flops, rice, garbage heave up on a pitted street.

On a side street, we see a man, like one lone oxen, pulling a cart of his neck strained and glistening in full noon heat.

Sometimes a place moans like a gashed wound that won’t heal. Hope can seem more like a howl.

We get there late to the church.

The children’s band is already playing it next to the street.

Playing it on trumpets brazenly right out into the street: “God is so good, God is so good.”

There is Truth that is louder and surer than anything you can see or feel — and nothing that we have can change the sureness of Who He is.  

We applaud the band and they lead us into the church and the Compassion project director, he prays.

The children sing in unison.

They welcome.

And after it happened, we talked about it but none of us knew how it happened or where it came from but from the hills where our Help comes from.

So it came from the Hills and the Helper, and the music somehow got louder and the clapping somehow got stronger and the feet somehow found the rhythm, found themselves dancing.

And the children clapped and swirled and laughed about us and we were dancing, we were all dancing.

{RSS or email readers: click here to watch the video of our worship in Haiti this week — the most amazingly hopeful worship ever!}

Hope, it is exquisitely fragile and it is an exceptional force and it is essential to faith and you can’t afford to lose it. Lose your fears but never your hope.

The whole church fills with this trumpeting worship and we raise our hands and sway and hope can create a quake that cracks all despair. Our smiles can be real epicenters. Christ-centered joy that brings down all the walls.

There is hope here — a hope refrain that won’t end. Hope, it lives in us, in Christ Who is in us. And how can the horns not herald it, even here: Never despair of a situation more than you trust in your Savior.

It isn’t the likelihood of your hope that sustains you, but the object of your hope that sustains you.

And the dancing rises into this blowing of bubbles, all this kaleidescope of color, all the reaching of hands for things hoped for and unseen and seen.

And the dancing rises into this blowing of bubbles, all this kaleidescope of color, all the reaching of hands for things hoped for and unseen and seen.

And it rises, the notes, the hearts, the praise, the hope – hope, this light and buoyant rising on all this spinning, shimmering globe.

All His glory light in their eyes.

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“You are worried and troubled about many things. But one thing is needed.”

—Luke 10:41-42

Would you please just take one moment of your day — and if you are American — would you spend just a moment praying for one of these children? And if you are in Canada — would you please just pray for one of these children? 

I can never thank you enough for considering being Christ’s hand and feet here in Haiti — of sponsoring a child here in Haiti. 

 

 

Related Posts:

How the American Dream can become Christmas in July

What Your Address Really Is

What You Really Need to Know Before You Step Out into the WorldClick here to download a free Easter Devotional : A Trail to the Tree {please give it a few moments to download… thank you for grace!}

How the American Dream becomes Christmas in July

The boy made a wreath out of wood.

And all one December, as the snow fell and the carols played, we sat around a farm table and remembered how a mother swayed heavy with child and we waited for Christ.

The boy made more wreaths out of wood.

He sent them around the whole world.

And more families, they lit candles around the wreath and the figurine of the mother, she travailed on the donkey on the way and she awaited her deliverance and so did all the world.

Laboring for more can birth more pain & if we only give if it’s painless, is this how Christians miscarry Christ?

The boy, he took the funds from his cutting and sanding and months of advent wreaths and he gave it away.

Then come the heat of July, when the wheat in the fields bowed ready and the monarch butterflies lit, it was the boy who started on his way.

“You will need this.”

His grandmother handed him a bag full of love she had stitched.

He carried her gift onto the plane.

And the boy and his mother flew to a country where the ground had shook hard and hope had right cracked and the very earth had seemed to split open to try and swallow up all the future.

A driver drove them down streets teeming with people and garbage and dogged courage and the boy said little.

Children scavenged through rotting street refuse for food.

His mother’s heart contracted hard, labor pains for the hurting and she tried to remember to breathe. They drove out of the city moaning for relief, drove for hours, then turned off the highway into the yard of an inn named The Alpha Hotel.

The boy turned and grinned, “So this is only the beginning?” And the mother had nodded even after they had already come so far. Every day is day One and new beginnings can happen anywhere down the road.

There was room at the Alpha and they took it.

They took two beds and slept under groaning fans in heat that smothered like Hades in a heat wave. The boy’s mother lifted the toilet lid to pull on a chain to flush the toilet. A rat ran in front of the door.

In the morning, they were served pumpkin soup for breakfast because, the driver said, this was what they had eaten long ago to celebrate their freedom from slavery.

The boy slurped the soup down.

We still enslave in a thousand ways and we bring freedom to the oppressed when we’re not enslaved to things at all — but only to Christ alone.

The driver headed into the sun.

And the road choked and coughed and the boy held on and the mother bounced and banged.

Then the road got harder.

They wound higher, past the huts and the cows and the children waiting, waiting for any deliverance at all.

They drove through the waters, past the woman scrubbing clothes in the river.

Drove through the swarming market and the thatched stalls on heaps of stones.

Drove through the donkeys all tied up, waiting for their load to go home.

An old woman held on to her cane and held onto her donkey and her silhouette, it bent heavy with this hoping for hope.

And then the road got narrower.

And the way got steeper.

And the driver wondered if he was lost.

And this is the way the way often is.

But the boy said this narrow, hard road, he knew it was the right way.

When he saw a woman standing out in the heat waiting, her hand on her nine month swollen side. When he saw the sign on the building that said “Welcome,” when children clapped and cheered, when mothers with babes in arms lined the porch, then he nodded as if he’d knew he’d about arrived.

The mother knew they were there when they laid a baby in her arms and it was like the mountains all rang.

 

All the boy’s advent wreaths, all those donkeys supporting the mother heavy with child, it had supported these 50 women, these 50 babies, for a whole 12 months, December to July to December.

Jean and Fenelon, they told the boy of the twins born in the ditch on the 6 hour walk to the hospital – and how one babe was lost but because of the Compassion Child Survival Program the boy and his wreaths had given to the village and the very real grace of God, the second twin lived.

And Vilnez, a mother of five, she said it soft and the boy had to lean to hear, how the project had given her medicine when sick and helped fill the bowls of her children and brought a nurse to the village around the clock and the program was a grace of God. Her hair was so fine and her little one’s eyes so big.

It was after the pastor stood on the side of the mountain and read from Proverbs 31 about the excellencies of a godly woman and how children are life and after the program’s sewing teacher showed the boy the women’s stitches and new skills.

After they spoke of their Bible study and literacy classes and public health lessons and educational play groups and how the babies thrived.

When they told the boy and his mother that Compassion’s Child Survival Program had shared the gospel of Christ with each of the mothers and 8 more had souls had named Jesus as Lord and 3 unwed mothers had married and 2 more had been baptized and they would like to give the boy a gift of thanks— that is when the mother looked over at her boy.

The place rang loud with the singing of mothers and the clapping of children. And the American dream about climbing higher can turn upside down for the dreams of God. The mother felt it in her heart, felt all this for her son smiling so broad.

American dreams are about having much and God dreams are about giving much. Anything we might gain will never makes us as happy as what we might give away. The mother could hear it all ringing in her ears, shaking her heart wide awake.

American dreams are about this need to become a someone. God dreams are about becoming bread for anyone in need because they love SomeOne.

The old Haitian pastor teared as he shook the boy’s hand and the mother couldn’t stop all her happiness streaming down, down, the happiness always coming in the descending down.

American dreams are about climbing out of all burdens. And God dreams are about carry a cross and sharing one another’s burdens.

How do Christians really bear another’s burden, if we refuse to bear any burden at all?

Am I a Pharisee tossing a painless coin from my excess or a bowed lady giving a tender offering, a bit like the painful, joy-filled last mite? How many times has my “I can’t give” really mean, “I can’t give without bearing a burden myself?”

How can we take a load off someone else’s back without taking a bit of a load on ourselves and what else can it mean to pick up His cross and follow Him?

The mothers sang and danced and the joy rang light off all the hills to all the heavens.

The boy, he laughed — the wreaths from wood had grown hope in the mountains of Haiti.

The giving of December’s Advent wreaths had made it Christmas in July!

And the son turned to his mother. “Today may be the best day of my life.”

And the mother looked into the eyes of the boy that was once her babe and now a man after Him and she murmured, “Mine too, son, mine too.”

And at the end, the boy handed to the mothers what his grandmother had made — all these baby blankets, bits of this legacy of her love handed down from one generation to the next, now left in the mountains of Haiti to go wrap around the next generation and out and on.

And the director of the center, he gave to the boy a painting of the Child Survival Program, of the mothers with their babies, love that were now on its way too.

The boy from the farm and the mothers from the mountains, they shared gifts.

And the burden was shared and the burden was relieved and the burden of our crosses can deliver us into full Joy.

Down the mountain, the boy and his mother passed more donkeys swaying lower as they went higher —

bearing the weightless burden of a grace that gives.

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Bear one another’s burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ. ~ Galatians 6:2

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Thank you, all, for caring for the mothers of Haiti in 2011-2012 with Caleb’s wooden wreaths  – for being part of the 1000 Moms Project and the legacy of thanks to your own Mom now caring for these mothers and babies for another year, into 2013.

Your love goes on and on up the narrow, hard road and this whole community is making a difference — in Jesus’ name.   Christmas in July!  

Would you please just take one moment of your day — and if you are American — would you spend just a moment praying for one of these children? And if you are in Canada — would you please just pray for one of these children? 

I can never thank you enough for considering being Christ’s hand and feet here in Haiti — of sponsoring a child here in Haiti. 

 

 

Related Posts:

What Your Address Really Is

What You Really Need to Know Before You Step Out into the World

 Click here to download a free Easter Devotional : A Trail to the Tree {please give it a few moments to download… thank you for grace!}

When Compassion Becomes a Gold Rush

Caleb and I are in a high rural part of Haiti and can’t post today but will be sharing about the 1000 Moms project and Caleb’s donation from the wreaths to the Moms here in Haiti at a Child Survival center on Thursday.

More stories and photos to come, but for today, remembering how this story of Jonathan forever changed us:

 

We wind around a thousand mountains and canoe up a river of gold to find him.

To find the boy someone named Jonathan.

Gold panners, they run the whole throat of the Amazon through their boxes, through their bare hands, looking for gold flakes flashing…

Jonathan, he just stands by his shack on toothpick stilts and barely flashes a smile.

(Photo by Keely Scott)

(Photo by Keely Scott)

 

(Photo by Keely Scott)

(Photo by Keely Scott)

(Photo by Keely Scott)

We find Jonathan in the jungle, off the banks of the Amazon. He’s fifteen.

He is scared. He shakes like a thin leaf in wind.

“My mother, she runs out on us when I was four.” He tells the translator this.

His voice’s a whisper, not even a ripple.

“I do not know where she lives.” I don’t need translation to know his fear, hear how his voice quakes.

“I have seen my mother only once in my life again.”

Jonathan keeps twisting his own hands, a wringing out of pain.

“My father, he leaves the city when my mother runs out. He brings us back to the jungle, so my grandparents can help us live.” A skinny hen clucks behind him.

“But there is no work for him here and he goes up the river to work at a village.” Jonathan glances out towards the Amazon.

“So, his grandparents are still here?” I look towards the translator —

The translator repeats the question in Spanish.

“No.” Jonathan shakes his head. “No grandparents anymore.”

I am trying to understand. Make sense of this.

“So you are here alone?” I glance up at this hut propped into sky. At all this jungle.

“My father, he takes my brother with him when he goes.”

I nod slow.

And why not Jonathan?

“My brother is my Father’s favorite.”

“My father tells me to stay here. My father leaves me alone here.”

Something flashes – and I understand. And I don’t at all.

Someone named him Jonathan — but no one loves Jonathan like a brother.

No one loves him like their own soul.

Jonathan is a boy abandoned in the jungle. And only for a moment —

I am looking into the whites of his eyes.

How do you turn away?

What do you say to a son right between the ages of your two oldest sons, a son with no courage left, both halves of his heart leaving him here at the edge of the Amazon river – the river streaming on without him?

How do you abandon a child to poverty when you’ve looked right into the begging whites of his eyes?

What do you say to this one scared voice shaking in wind?

Jonathan looks down at the ground, his one hand holding the other, him standing alone.

Patricia finds words – stretches out the only hope we have. She asks it quiet.

“Does he go to church? What does he think of Jesus?”

Jonathan lights — “Yes, yes. I go to church and sing to Jesus. It makes all the time go faster, looking forward to going to church each Sunday.” The boy marks time by God — with God. Why does swallowing in this place hurt?

“How – how does he get enough to eat?” I ask the translator.

My throat won’t stop burning.

“His father brings him food now and then.” Andreaya says this, our translator with Compassion.

“But when I visited him last week, he had no food. Nothing at all to eat. His father hadn’t come in three weeks.”

Jonathan doesn’t look up.

I look up. Trying to keep it from running down.

(Photo by Keely Scott)

(Photo by Keely Scott)

For a long moment we all say nothing. We try to be brave.

The Amazon sun beats down on us.

Looking up, his house there on stilts, I say this quiet to Andreaya, trying to encourage, to find a nugget of good.

“Tell him his house is beautiful. That I have never seen one so lovely.”

The white and aqua and coral, it shines in the jungle.

 

(Photo by Keely Scott)

“My father, when he brought me food the last time, I told him you were coming.”

You have to turn you ear to him to hear him speak, he’s so barely there. So trying to disappear.

“I told him that special people were coming. Then he came and painted it.”

I look him in the eye and he looks away and I want to cup his face.

A father who doesn’t want his son — but wants to impress?

A father who doesn’t care to love a child like his own soul, but competes and compares – and casts off?

A father who wants one child – but not another?

When he shows us his bedroom, there are no photos of his father on the wall. Or mother or brother. Just a trio of smiles— a photo of a family, a long haired girl, a cluster of kids. It’s good to find smiling here. We brush at wet cheeks and smile too and ask who are these beautiful friends of yours, Jonathan?

I look towards our translator. She asks Jonathan and she turns to us —

“These are his Compassion sponsors.” The the only family he knows, right there, hanging over his bed, the only things hanging on the walls of this hut. Love is always our only art.

“These are the letters they write me.” A smile flickers. The scrawling script under the Compassion logo talks of snow and dogs and school. “I love Mr. Andrew and his family very much.”

He whispers it.

Love is always our only hope.

(Photo by Keely Scott)

(Photo by Keely Scott)

We tell him that Mr. Andrew loves him, that Christ loves him, that all of us at Compassion, we care, and we give him a bag of groceries.

The boy slumps to his bed. He opens the bag. He holds the can of sardines long, the bag of rice. He smiles when he holds the can of peaches.

“You can’t know what this means to me.” He whispers and we all nod. We’re looking directly into the whites of hunger. He holds onto one loaf of bread.

And he tells us that he got baptized last summer. That the pastor who offers the Compassion program asked him if he was ready and he said yes and he walked right into the Amazon and came up proclaiming newness in Christ.

I can see it, how he would have come out of those waters — pure gold.

“To celebrate, we went back to the church and had the Lord’s Supper.” Isn’t that always the only way to celebrate life in Christ – to take it all as bread, to be the bread, to be the bread broken and given?

Standing in Jonathan’s shack, him with a loaf of bread in his hand, that is what’s burning in me. – this fire in my bones to be bread, broken and given and is there anything better than to be bread broken and given for another man? Make me blessing, God of Grace, and make me Bread, Bread of Heaven and I will not let go of you until you make me a blessing, God who is a river of blessings and calls all the blessings to flow on and on, never running out.

There’s his Bible there on the rough wood shelf by his bed, the only book in the room.

Jonathan looks down at the loaf of bread — “My father, if he brings food, he brings it on Sunday mornings, when he knows I am at church.” He sets the loaf of bread on the floor.

“After church, I run as fast as I can home from church.”

I can see this too, how his feet would fly, running to find his father.

“But most times — my father is already gone before I get home.”

How do you stop up a heart howl?

How do you keep looking at the crumpling of one young boy?

How do you right the world?

Maybe it’s about not wanting to impress — but wanting your Father and what He wants for all His children. Maybe you don’t compare and compete with the Jones’ — but care for the hungry? Maybe you care about one child — and all the other children too? Make me bread, God.

“Sometimes I am lonely.” Jonathan says this, looking past us, out the open door. He’s saying it like a confession, like a murmuring…

“Sometimes, when I am very lonely… I lay in my hammock and …. I just sing these songs to God.”

And he starts to blur and swim, me all brimming, and I feel it low, like a kick in the gut –

And maybe this is right?

“To be moved with compassion” — that phrase, it’s only spoken of in Scripture in regards to Christ and our Father, and it’s “splangchnisomai” in the Greek— and it’s what we’d call guts.

When Christ was moved with Compassion, it’s like he got kicked in the gut.

Christ’s people feel compassion like Christ did, and they feel the strike to the stomach, they feel the pain in the deepest places, and they hurt and they bend over and they reach down and they reach out and their lives become cruciformed, shaped into the cross of Christ. Compassion isn’t merely a vague sense — but a feeling so strong that it causes you to bend: it shapes your body, your life, into a response.

Compassion is the radical cross-shaping of a life.

Underneath the stars I see at home on the farm, there’s one boy in the Amazon jungle, lonely and alone and looking to the hills whence does He come, and he sings songs to God – to God with Him – Immanuel.

The God of Compassion is the God who is with us, the Word who became flesh and dwelt among us — who doesn’t abandon us in the our brokenness, who doesn’t forsake us or reject us or leave us fatherless, the God who forever sings forever love over us, whose lyrics accompany all our lonely hammock watches.

Compassion it’s birthed out of the Latin ‘pati’ and ‘cum’ and it means “to suffer with” and it’s there, spilling down all of us standing there with Jonathan, rivers carving something out of us, and we are heart naked and we are not ashamed: Compassion chooses to suffer with the sick, to be kicked in the gut, to weep with the weak, to pray with the powerless, to cry with the castoffs. Compassion is the condition of being fully human and fully Christ-like and being fully with.

The food matters. The shelter matters. The education matters. But nothing matters more than the love. To not evade pain, but enter into it, to not just to not just write out a check, but write a letter – because compassion is about doing life with a child. Ours is God-with-us. It’s compassion that stands in solidarity with the suffering and isn’t the greatest gift we can give always the gift of presence?

Jonathan shifts from one foot to the other.

I hand it to him shy – a Jesus Storybook Bible in Spanish– and I tell him he can give it away if a children’s bible is too juvenile, wave my arms about, embarrassed and flailing.

But he holds it like treasure and says he will keep it, says Noah is his favorite and he finds the page.

The boy baptized in the Amazon reads the story clearly.

The story of waters and rivers and boats and storms and escape and a piece of wood that saves. His thumb’s right there on the title Noah — the page illustrating the enfolding of the faithful into the bowels of the ark, into a womb of wood.

And I want to whisper to Jonathan that the Hebrew word for compassion is like the Greek – that it’s “rachamim” – meaning bowels, a tender love, and that rachamim derives from the word “rechem”, meaning womb. And Christ’s followers are always safe in the womb of the wood and no matter the seeming circumstances, our Christ is moved with compassion and we move within the womb of God.

Our God is both Father, mother, and His Body but our brother and sister and stirred in the deepest places, the compassion of Christ shakes this earth to respond, to labor and deliver with Him a new Kingdom coming, to bring into this world the endless, streaming amazon of God’s tender compassions, His new mercies and inexhaustible, Christ-made grace.

Jonathan looks up from the page of his Bible. The translator asks, “He wants to know – can he hug you?”

And I nod and enfold Jonathan in arms and he is closer than a brother.

It’s compassion that’s the womb of God.

(Photo by Keely Scott)

When we ride the Amazon river out, a storm builds big behind us.

We ride our boat pass the panners. We hold on to our wood.

We watch how the wind blows through the jungle and who knows where it came from and where it goes.

We watch how the wind blows gilded leaves out of the trees, all yellow, all gilded flakes lifted by the breath of God.

I point and the Farmer nods and all the gold falls to the water, to the current carrying us on.

Behind us, somewhere on the river tonight, Jonathan will sing, him panning for God.

And the river will carry his song to the ocean, to the world — There are children here. There is gold here.

And there will be a rush of compassion and it will make the givers rich —

all their bare hands flashing with the flecks of forever….

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… be compassionate, just as your Father is compassionate.

Luke 6:36

 

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Might I ask — will you pray about sponsoring a child in need today? They need you — and you need them…

And what ever you are thinking and wherever you are at right now —

Thank you for giving the gift of prayer right now to just one child in need of Hope…

 Click here to download a free Easter Devotional : A Trail to the Tree {please give it a few moments to download… thank you for grace!}

What You Really Need to Know Before You Step Out into the World

What have you got to make sure you really know before you step out into the whole wide world?

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Maybe you just keep stepping into the gloriously messy world and God makes it clearer than you’d ever hoped?

I fly to Haiti with Compassion, with you, our oldest son on the brink of stepping out from under his mother’s wing and I stand beside you.

I stand beside those shoulders of yours broadening into a man’s on that Haitian front porch after the rain and you prayed in this deepening baritone for that mother and her five daughters.

A girl about 7 years old leaned in the doorframe of that house without a stitch of clothes on her.

A rooster scratched in the dirt.

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The mother said it so softly we could hardly hear her, that she had no work, that she had nothing.

Just five daughters and this quavering voice and you standing on her front step praying hope in Christ over her.

Do you know how many prayers a mother prays over a son, praying he’ll someday pray?

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I have simply prayed one thing for you and it is not as it seems: that you will be truly happy.

Because there is no true happiness apart from holiness, and there is no true holiness apart from knowing what it means to suffer unhappiness. And there is no knowing how to suffer unhappiness apart from God.

You saw that today, saw it in the woman’s eyes on a front porch in Haiti, rain splattering off edge of that rusting tin roof. I simply pray you will not be apart from God. I don’t say this cheaply: It’s through suffering unhappiness that God may beckon you into deeper happiness in Him. Don’t be afraid.

Because the thing is: I don’t want you to get all A’s in life. I want you to get life. I want you to get God. A.W. Tozer said that you can have as much of God as you want.

It’s wild to think about that: How much of God do you really want? How happy do you really want to be? Why would you avoid Him and all your joy — when you could hunger for Him and have as much happiness as you want?

What I am trying to tell you is that no matter where you end up, where the road leads: You can have as much God as you want. As much joy in Him as you want. The real believers relentlessly believe that. The world or circumstances will try to dupe you differently– but it’s a law as irrefutable as gravity itself: no matter what — as much God as you want.

Is there anything else worth wanting or having?

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Do you know what the men who fathered those five daughters but abandoned their mother and all – do you know what they didn’t know? It’s what every man has to know before he goes out into the world so he knows how to stay:

Love isn’t a feeling but a tying. The practical translation of “I Love You” is “I am Tied to You” — no matter what breaks loose. Love never gives up but lays itself down. Do this — this is the way of God.

All you have here is one lifetime and time. is. your. life. When you spend time with someone, what you are freely giving away is your life. Do this — this is the way of God. But when you spend time with screens, what you are freely giving away might be your very soul. Isn’t this the way of insanity? Anything stealing your time, it’s stealing your life.

And that pressure you feel? To fit some mold, that very real pressure that’s trying to form you into the image of this crazy, trendy world? Resist it and write this on your heart:

What will keep you from doing much good — is caring too much what others think.

This isn’t only a phenomenon of adolescence. This can be the foolishness of adults.

What would the world look like if Christians didn’t care about keeping up with the Joneses but about keeping company with Christ?

Maybe we’d keep our souls from insecurity and our minds from insanity?

Maybe we could be brave enough to be different, have less and be more, and change the world?

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Timothy Keller  said it: “There is a direct relationship between a person’s grasp and experience of God’s grace, and his or her heart for justice and the poor.”

That’s what I want you to know: all is grace. Because when you have experienced great grace in Christ, it leads you toward greater justice for all.

It comes down to who do you want to be, what you want to be known for. How many times on this trip have you been asked what your future plans are and you talk of our Lord willing and university the year after this and a degree in economics or business and maybe someday that’ll be you, introducing yourself as a financial consultant.

And I think of God, how many times our God introduces Himself like this, how God wants to really be known in this world for this,

“The Lord your God… defends the cause of the fatherless and the widow, and loves the immigrant, giving him food and clothing.” Deuteronomy 10:17-18

This is how our God is known from all the other gods, for standing with the weak. Who will be strong enough to do this? Will you be known what our God is known for and love who God loves and give the poor like God gives? The greatest steps out into the world never step away from the poor.

The only goods worth really having is the moral good from giving away.

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When you stood with the mother and her girls, did you see it — while your head was still bowed, after you’d prayed for God to bless a penniless woman living in a loaned house with five daughters after the lust of men had all run out, after you had said your Amen and meant it and believed the angels cheered – did you see what was etched into the step under your feet?

Someone had written it when the concrete step had been wet back in September of 1993 and this is all that will ever matter:

Si Dieu est…

“If God is for us than who can be against us?”  Romans 8:31

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Who needs a message in the sky?

When it all comes down to what is written right there at your feet.

Right there in a one-room shanty porch in Haiti, etched into your begging prayers and you can have nothing materially and you can have everything eternally because what can stand against you if God stands for you?

It’s written into your every step in this world.

Don’t be afraid.

When you turn on the step, turn on the edge, and the mother smiles her thanks and you smile hope —

you step off the step and into that certain grace dripping down on us all.

 

 

 

If you would like to be God’s hand and feet here in Haiti, consider sponsoring a child through Compassion  Canada or Compassion International

 

Click here to download a free Easter Devotional : A Trail to the Tree {please give it a few moments to download… thank you for grace!}

What Your Address Really Is

The bus that we boarded at the airport, it drove right through an earthquake.

It turned out of the airport like we did this afternoon, with a Canadian Compassion team on board just like ours, and somewhere on its way through the streets toward the Hotel Montana, something grabbed hold of the earth and shook it hard and the ground imploded, like a lung sunken  in.

Two years later, they’re still clearing rubble away.

Two years later my heart quakes a bit through the Port Au Prince streets and I try to remember to breathe.

The streets, they heave with people and old stoves and stacks of tires and racks of clothes and women selling food from open flames and these trucks striped and painted like rainbows transporting people to somewhere else, people looking for hope, legs and arms and feet dangling out all the sides.

This isn’t Kansas.

This isn’t Guatemala or Ecuador or some spliced news clip from CNN.

This is a smothering day in July and these are mothers carrying sweating babies in their arms and wound bags of clothes on their heads and these are fathers hawking flip flops on the corner and these are old grandfathers sitting hollow and haunted on the curbs and these are sons the ages of my boys who are standing lost in the rubble and the refuse and the reality.

I’m crazy enough to believe that this is the address of uncontainable grace.

Crazy enough to believe that even this is the thing: Wherever joy seems unattainable is right where God’s grace is uncontainable. 

The glory of His grace that can’t be contained only to the pristine and perfected and suburbian-polished but overflows into the gasping, strewn streets, that touches something, changes something, stirs something as it spills down the sides of shanty-stacked hills.

You can catch glimpses of it out the bus window: There are Haitian women in white blouses, white skirts holding out Bibles on dirty corners. There are men in ties sharing the Gospel. They are standing atop the walls that have crumbled. Caleb leans over, “See that, Mom?” And I nod because there is the whole earth and what addresses on earth can ever bar out His glory?

There are police in army fatigues in the courtyard of our hotel.

The hydro keeps dozing black off in our rooms.

And on the day same day we drove away from the farm in the early dark and passed the wheat field ripening ready and ate crackers and pretzels at 30,000 feet, looking down at the ocean relentlessly reaching out to touch the shores of Haiti,  we stand in the dark of a hotel lobby and a member of the Compassion team reads Psalm 96 by flashlight and I can feel it, my heart tremoring hard and everything still stands:

Sing to the Lord a new song;

sing to the Lord, all the earth…

For great is the Lord and most worthy of praise…;

Ascribe to the Lord, all you families of nations,

ascribe to the Lord glory and strength…

Worship the Lord in the splendor of his holiness;

tremble before him, all the earth…

Say among the nations, “The Lord reigns. ”

The world is firmly established, it cannot be moved;

When the light comes up, we pack gifts for the Child Development Centers. I pack flutes. I think of new songs. We could sing them, we could be the gifts. His reign is established and the earth can quake and nothing moves. Caleb, he pumps up a whole suitcase of soccer balls for Haitian kids.

I watch Caleb pumping, grinning, pumping, red faced, smiling-gasping for air.

And the balls, like whole earths, they fill with air.

I stand there smiling, nodding — singing.

There are witnesses to the inflating of lungs imploded, witnesses to all His relentless glory right here.

 

May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in Him, so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.

Romans 15:13

{Caleb and I are visiting the Child Survival Program of Haitian Moms 3 and babies — three hours from Port Au Prince. Pray for us? We are praying for internet connection too — so all of you who supported the 1000 MOMS PROJECT can come with us too! All is grace!}

 

Thanks is a word that takes us before God and into the joy of our true homeland…

Print it for the fridge and dare everyone in the family to find these 3 gifts from His hand each day:

Click here to print July’s Joy Dare! Put it on the fridge! Dare the Kids! And begin this week — this month-- right!

Count three gifts a day, 1000 gifts in 2012 (and be entered to win the NikonD90 camera?)

Thank-you is a word that can change you, your world — the whole world!

HOW TO ENTER JULY’S GIVEAWAY:

Each day of July, either share your gifts on on Twitter {label with #1000gifts #JoyDare so we can find you!}, or with us in the gratitude community at Facebook , or on Pinterest (#1000gifts).

Each day, 3 people will who share their gifts via Twitter, Facebook or Pinterest will be randomly selected & entered into a drawing for JOY BASKET: a gift card @ Amazon {100$} & {signed copies of One Thousand Gifts, the photographic gift book, the DayBrightner, and the family gratitude journal} Give thanks to Him in the assembly!

Join us? And happily change everything by keeping your own crazy list of One Thousand Gifts?

Please, jump in, make your life about giving thanks to God! — Just add the direct URL to your specific 1000 gift list post… and if you join us, we humbly ask that you please help us find each other in our refrain of thanks by sharing the community’s graphic within your post.

Give thanks to the Lord! His Love Endures Forever!

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 Click here to download a free Easter Devotional : A Trail to the Tree {please give it a few moments to download… thank you for grace!}

weekends are for harvest preparation

The Farmer {and his oh, so fabulous crew!} are about ready for the field…

And Caleb and I are at the gate for Haiti!

And we’re all off!

{Thank you for joining with us all this coming week! }

Creative Inspiration for the Weekend :  just a few quiet moments for a walk and something lovely like this? {You are living these 7 Habits of Creativity and making happy time everyday to be creative, yes?}

Photography Inspiration for the Weekend :  Take photos of family? This tutorial to make your photos amazing!

Love for the Weekend: Take the 30 Day Marriage Project… 30 days to more love? Yes!

Kitchen (Cool) Creativity for the Weekend:  Hot where you are? This is the perfect (quick) recipe to cool down everyone on a blazing hot day!

Free Printable for the Weekend :   There are only so many days in a summer — and only so many summers. Print this out and fill it out. Really — you’ll be so happy at the end of the summer! (Need ideas on how to fill it out? These summer ideas may prime your pump!)

Make a Memory on the Weekend :  Now doesn’t this look like way too much fun? What a way to make a memory!

Kindness on the Weekend :  Dare you to grab someone and go do this, this weekend. All you need is a piece of chalk and a smile  — Easy, memorable, cheap ridiculous fun — that blesses someone else!

Clean on the Weekend : Top 10 Cleaning Tips from the cleaning professionals…. who knew?

Worship for the weekend :   Weightless …. with Christa Wells…. “Well, I’ve carried this a long time

in a well hidden bundle on my back, but I’ve realized repentance is weightless… ” I pray this weekend — you’ll leave your burdens on the track. Weightless in Christ…  singing with you… 

May the grace and truth of our Father surprise you all over again this weekend, friends…

Click here to download a free Easter Devotional : A Trail to the Tree {please give it a few moments to download… thank you for grace!}

Why Now is the Perfect Time

On the way into town, the boy told me the wheat was about ready.

And I look across to the west and all those gold heads swaying yes — and I look over at him, elbow resting half out the window and all July’s heat blowing in, and none of this was supposed to happen this way.

The Farmer had said yes, if any week would work, he had said this one would —  after the children’s heads were all full of their school books and before the wheat heads bowed fully down. Before he would need me in the fields to bring in the kernels ready to fall to the ground.

We could fly because the fields were supposed to be ready after Haiti. After the oldest boy and I returned from the poorest country in the western hemisphere — then we would harvest the wheat and make our bread. And I’m not saying that there wasn’t something horribly wrong with that.

What if plans are better as prayers and what if everything is supposed to happen this way because His Sovereign Hand can make any happening into good?

And what if the harvest of our lives is not in how we earn our bread and butter, but only if we make our lives into bread to give away? The wheat fields keep swaying their yes.

In town, the oldest boy and I go up to the old People’s store, same one I bought a purple comb and matching mirror for my little sister, Christmas of 1982. Because we need to find clothes for Jonelson, the 8-year-old Haitian boy we sponsor through Compassion. And for Hulda and Jean, the two young students we’re sponsoring through university through Compassion’s Leadership Development Program.

I don’t really know how to buy clothes for people I’ve never met.

I carry their glossy pictures from rack to rack. This skirt look too large. These pants look too wide. Trying to rightly size up someone from pixels, it’s a bit like

Our oldest, Caleb, he picks out a shirt and tie for Jean. “He looks about my size, don’t you think?”

I look down at the photo. Jean’s just started university. Caleb is only a year away.

Caleb smooths the buttons down his chest and I hold the photo of Jean up to his shoulder and how can love come straight out of the thin air giving?

Standing there with Jean’s photo in one hand and a shirt for him in the other, it happens right here, just like it’s supposed to.

Love happens.

I can already see Jean tying that tie. I can see him like a son smoothing out buttons. I can see him standing about as tall as my son right here and it’s my heart that tying to God. For God so loved the world, He gave and I’m picking out clothes for strangers and I can see it, how they will fill with this giving and we do, and when you give of yourself, love happens.

You don’t always end up giving because you love.

Sometimes you end up loving because you give.

It does feel like the brink of the harvest.

On the way down the back roads to the farm, Caleb sits with the shirt for Jean,  skirts for Hulda, swimming trunks and shoes for Jonelson, his head leaned against the passenger window, the wheat fields streaming by.

“You knew that, right, Mom? How it’s always when the monarch butterflies are out over the fields.” Caleb turns towards the fields gilded in the lateness of the deepening sun.

“The wheat’s always about ready when the monarch butterflies circle together out over the fields.”

And I nod slow towards the wheat dying into gold and there is so much you can know but still have to live out the knowing.

How the dying and the giving your life away is always right when a life lights with wings.

Now is always the perfect time to die to self and be broken and given.

And it’s right there out the window.

How the wheat might yield heavy this year — all these fields of the prayerful yes.

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:

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Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone;

but if it dies, it bears much fruit.

John 12:24

 

{I can’t thank you enough for joining Caleb & I here as we head to Haiti in the morning… Do you feel it too? Why now is the perfect time and we all could be ready for a harvest?}

 

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