Friday, May 21, 2010

Providence of God

Psalm 16:5-6 states, "Lord, you have assigned me my portion and my cup; you have made my lot secure. The boundary lines have fallen for me in pleasant places; surely I have a delightful inheritance."

verse 6 again but this time in the ESV "The LORD is my chosen portion and my cup; you hold my lot."

In Beth Moore's paraphrasing translation the same 2 verses go like this: "Lord, in all the chaos and crisis, all the threat and doubt, You caused my life to work out. Instead of me falling apart, the lines of my life have fallen together. Truly, I can say that You have given me a delightful inheritance."

Does anybody else feel their life echoing the truth of these verses?

Beth Moore goes on to say that no matter what in life - or Satan himself - hands us, the favor God has on His children causes that "lot" (our destiny or fate) to tumble out on the table in such a way that, instead of destruction, the child will discover that her portion turned into destiny one trusting step at a time. When all is said and done, she will see that the portion God assigned her was good. Right. Rich. Full of purpose.

Amen.

Safari with ERJ kids

Yesterday, I went with a Family Christian Stores James Fund group that was visiting us for the week to go on a field trip with the kids from ERJ - El Retiro Juvenil. We went to my favorite field trip location on the entire planet - Bioparque Estrella. At this "zoo" you can go on a safari. As you can see from the photos - it's a little intense.

Luis feeding Nelson the giraffe and laughing hysterically
The camels are a bit aggressive. You never know what they'll do

The giraffes are probably the most gentle animal you encounter there

they look like velociraptors when they come straight at you for food - i feel like i'm in the movie Jurassic Park

this is me petting David the giraffe

The kids had a great time but I think it was the Americans on this field trip who had the experience of a life time - one they'll never forget haha.

Tuesday, May 18, 2010

Miracles in the Ukraine

If my last post left you feeling super depressed... read this one to cheer up.

I had a chance to listen to Sergey Demidovich at the Summit of the Orphan VI. Sergey is a pastor from the Ukraine and his little translator woman was just about the cutest translator of all time. He was so passionate about his topic that he practically jumped up and down on stage and yelled at the translator in excitement and hoping she'd translate faster. The 2 together were hilarious.

His story is insane. Literally. Get ready. You aren't ready for this testimony.

He and his wife had 2 biological children. One day his wife told him that she felt like God was telling them to go to the hospital and hold orphaned babies and maybe adopt one. He said he did the "spiritual" thing and said, "no i think we should just pray about that." He says often times, when we have no intention of following through with anything we are being convicted about - we give that response... "I'll just pray about it." Eventually, they went together to the local hospital and held a sickly baby boy. Sergey said he felt no compassion for the child. He thought the kid was yucky and diseased and didn't look anything like him. After fulfilling his wife's request, he left the hospital. On the drive home, he says he heard the audible voice of God speaking to him as is speaking through the baby boy. This voice said things like, "why don't you want me? God has adopted you as a son of the most high, why won't you adopt me? Are you just going to leave me here?" and so on and so on. He started crying, was convicted, did a U-turn and went back to the hospital and adopted the baby boy who was rather sick and tiny. The baby cried everyday for months and they didn't know what they could do for him to help him but hold him, feed him and pray for him. They brought him back into the hospital a few months later for a check up and the doctors were shocked. They wanted to know what they had done because this child was not the same baby anymore. He wasn't sick or tiny or diseased anymore. They told the doctors they just prayed and then the doctors wanted to know all about whoever they were praying to. Sergey decided that although this child didn't look like him, this child would be his spiritual child b/c it would have his faith.

It didn't take long before Sergey decided that this adoption was the single greatest thing he'd ever done in his entire life. He started going door to door and telling every single person in his city about adoption and how awesome it is. He told his entire church from the pulpit every week about how awesome adoption is and how it is literally the heart of God. He started making christian inspirational short videos either about successful adoptions or children waiting to be adopted.

At this time, the Ukraine had over 300,000 orphans living in over crowded orphanages. The Ukraine was closed to all international adoptions. It was a crisis.

The government of Ukraine started to see the drastic numbers of children that were being adopted as a result of these short videos. So they started using Sergey's christian videos to encourage people from within their country to adopt orphans. Within 10 years of spreading the word all over the Ukraine to churches across the country there are now less than 30,000 children living in orphanages. That's insane.

That's god.

That's god absolutely moving on behalf of the orphan THROUGH the local church.

I believe that the local church has a HUGE role to play in our world's current orphan crisis. there are over 148 million orphans world wide. America's own back yard has over 140,000 children in waiting in foster care waiting to be adopted. Each year almost 30,000 children AGE OUT of foster care and NEVER get a forever family. They need us. They need the church.

Sergey has now adopted 3 children and was used of God to begin a movement that helped over 270,000 orphans in the Ukraine find forever families.

Trafficking News from the Summit VI

While at the Summit of the Orphan, I listened to Tom Davis who is the president of Children's Hope Chest and the author of Fields of the Fatherless, Red Letters, Confessions of a Good Christian Guy, Scared: A novel on the Edge of the World and Priceless. He's been all over the world and seen a lot of truth regarding how evil our world is - and he talked a ton about sex trafficking.

1.2 million people enter into sex trafficking every year. 800,000 each year are sent to a foreign country. 30 million have died as a result of being trafficked for sex.

When I think of sex trafficking, I think of red light districts in Cambodia or somewhere in Asia. Reality is that AMERICA is home to A LOT of trafficked boys, girls and women for sex ~~ any where from between 14,000 and 17,000 people a year are trafficked into the states for sex.

1/3rd of Craigs list revenue comes from sex ads. Many of these ads offer young girls for sex.

Atlanta is home to more sex trafficked individuals than any other city in America. For example, 3 different massage parlors were shut down in Macon, Georgia recently for trafficking girls.

Sex trafficking is the #2 business in the world - second only to drug trafficking. Sex trafficking brings in $32 billion a year.

1 Peter 5:8 says that "our enemy the devil prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour." I'd argue he's prowling around looking for 3 kinds of people:
1. helpless kids -- over 90% of which are ORPHANED children to traffic. for example 70% of russian orphans today eventually get sex trafficked
2. insecure adults who are willing to make a few dollars by trafficking kids and promote prostitution
3. individuals who are willing to PAY MONEY to buy SMALL CHILDREN for sex

if you ask me - the enemy is doing pretty well as of late in his attempts to traffic and destroy children, dont you think?

Less than 1% of trafficked children ever get out alive. Thus, PREVENTION IS KEY.

Imagine if you or your neighbors or your community group or someone you know from church adopted just ONE CHILD from say... russia. That's one less defenseless kid who will be trafficked. and that my friends is VICTORY and prevention and flipping awesome.

Interested in doing something? Check out:

We can:
1. Educate ourselves
2. Educate others
3. Give opportunities to help through prayer, financial donations to organizations at work, write senators and congressmen for funding and legislation to make it more difficult to traffic kids into the states, the media

Friday, May 14, 2010

Buy Coffee for Orphans

I love coffee. If you've ever looked into my fridge here in Mexico - you'd laugh and question me immediately about the number of full sized liquid coffee creamer bottles I have stock piled from the states. You can't buy liquid coffee creamer here in Mexico (only powder) - so I have quite the collection of coffee mate and international delight treasures from whenever any B2B staffer goes to Texas they buy me 4 or 5 at a time. So I got to thinking...

MOST OF US JUST LOOOOVE COFFEE....

we buy a ton of it - either personally, for our work place, or for our church

so i'd like to pass along this awesome not for profit that sells fair trade, organic, shade grown coffee from around the world and uses 100% of the profits to fund projects for orphans worldwide.



I was introduced to this organization while at the Summit of the Orphan a few weeks ago. I drank several cups of this coffee personally for days and it’s good stuff.

I even decided that since my mom loves fair trade coffee and refuses to buy coffee that could make a community poorer while some CEO makes a ton of money, that some gobena.org coffee was a great Mother’s Day present.


Check them out at http://gobena.org

They sell coffee from Columbia, Ethiopia, Guatemala, Ground or hole bean, expresso, decaf or regular. They have gift sets with mugs and Tshirts if you want. And they have large order subscription deals for businesses or churches if you wanted to buy a ton of coffee at once for a little bit cheaper of a price.

Wednesday, May 12, 2010

Summit of the Orphan VI


About a week ago, I had the opportunity to fly to Minnesota to attend The Summit of the Orphan VI which is put on by The Christian Alliance for the Orphan. There were over 1,300 people in attendance from all over the U.S. and also from ministries that do global orphan care like what Back2Back does. I've been meaning to blog about this for a while and you can expect many a blog post about this conference in the near future.

To begin, I'd like to give you a link to where, if you are interested - you can watch some of the main speakers. Here is a link to John Piper speaking on Living by Faith as you serve the fatherless

Honestly, I feel like there is so much to say about this event and what I learned that I could write a book.

But in response to John Piper's message which you can watch yourself by clicking the link above.... John Piper and his wife adopted at age 50. You are never too old to adopt. There are 148 million orphans worldwide and they don't care how old you are - they just want a home. There was a question and answer session before he gave his talk and John Piper was asked to respond to a question like... "why is it that the wife or women hear from God first about adopting a child and it's not usually the man who hears this call first?" Piper then proceeded to say, "It's because men in our culture don't understand Fatherhood. They need to quit dinking around on their ipads and cell phones and video games and be a man. Not just men who are married and have kids - I'm talking about young men who are not yet fathers - they need to understand Fatherhood and they don't. They don't understand God as a Father. God is mentioned more in the Bible as a father and not a mother. God is our Father. God has adopted us as sons and daughters. God fathers us." I found that super interesting and honestly just loved that he said everyone needs to quit "dinking around on their ipads."

more thoughts on the summit to come soon... i've only just begun

Tuesday, May 11, 2010

A GOOD day in my book

Below is a photo journal through what I think is a pretty fun day:

almost all good days for me involve these little guys

We read books in spanish and then they ask me to translate the page into English because apparently it's funny to hear me speak English

goof around during lunch

compete to see who can find the Eye Spy items first

we play around with my digital camera till the battery dies

And of course, we play soccer. But i dont have photos of that because i actually play WITH them. Usually I play goalie and I'm not very good at it. So if more than 2 goals gets scored against me - they move me out into the field to burn some calories running around.

This shouldn't happen

a typical house in an mexican "rio" community - homes made of collected trash

Deuteronomy 15 basically is what I'd call God's personal course in Biblical Economics. Just for kicks, let's call it, "Biblical Economics 101" taught by professor God through Teaching Assistant Moses. God's economy and his game plan for dealing with stuff like money and crops and an income are very different than the worlds. Go figure.

Go ahead and check out Deut 15 for yourself.

Deut 15:1 starts out saying that at the end of every 7 years you must cancel all debts. And verse 12 starts talking about freeing all labor or debt bound slaves after 7 years and returning land back to it's original owner, etc. 

We hear Deut 15:11 a lot! It says, "There will always be poor people in the land. Therefore I command you to be openhanded toward your brothers and toward the poor and needy in your land."



But this one jumped out at me a few days ago and I found every translation I could because I didn’t think it could be correct. Deut 15:4 says "THERE SHOULD BE NO POOR AMONG YOU...." WHAT??!? I find this to be just insane. There are poor people everywhere. 30,000 kids die everyday from starvation or preventable things like diarrhea. But God set up some system for us and there would be NO POOR if we would follow his rules and commands. MIND BLOWING... seriously

But then he goes on to say that there will always be poor among you. 
There shouldn’t be but there will be. Why is that? Are we just pathetic at following his ways and he predicted this?

 My commentary says that all societies will always have people who get rich and those who become poor due to uncertainties in life and that is why God says when you do come across anyone poor, we are commanded to extend generosity and kindness.

Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.... Christ came to show in word AND DEED what god's kingdom looks like. He proclaims freedom for the captives (yet leaves john the baptist in jail to get beheaded? interesting), sight for the blind, to bind up the broken hearted. Jesus healed people of their sins AND THEIR SICKNESSES. He didn’t tell people, "your sins are forgiven but you are still going to die a leaper." He healed them; he fed them - word and deed. 



So Jesus set up how we are live it out- bringing god's kingdom right here.



and THERE SHOULD BE NO POOR AMONG YOU. 

 God's saying, "Get on it. Follow my rules."

For whatever reason I find this mind blowing. There shouldn’t be poor people. 


Statistically if the American church alone would tithe and give some money away for the poor- we could eradicate all extreme world hunger and extreme world poverty instead of building newer multimillion-dollar sanctuaries and parking lots. God doesn’t live in a building. He lives in the eyes of a dying starving to death child. 



So then... if we decide: "We must do something! Let's help people." 
Apparently - we could act prematurely and without good wisdom and we hurt the poor instead of help them in our attempts to help them. This science of economics in helping the global poor is becoming more and more interesting to me with each passing day.

But I serve a God who apparently has the answer to our world's global crisis of extreme poverty and hunger. That's awesome.