renown

How can YOU be the change?

i think that's a phrase my kid(s) are going to get SICK of hearing me say. i'm thinking a lot more about parenting these days... since i am one of those now. Crystal and i are both thinking a lot more about it. we're talking about it all the time -- what kind of parents we want to be, what kinds of things we want to do for our kids, WHO we want them to be, etc...

and it's real now because Keira is here. so it's not just a nebulous idea.

but i think Keira will get sick of hearing me say to her "How can YOU be the change?"

let's say that she comes home from school & there is a kid that EVERYONE is making fun of/being mean to. the teacher didn't really seem to even care. Keira is bothered by it. i'm going to ask her - "How can YOU be the change that needs to happen?"

or maybe our neighbor has surgery and their yard is a wreck. Keira complains that it looks so ugly. "well, how can YOU be the change?"

and there are a million other examples.

EITHER:
she will get so sick of hearing me say this phrase that she will stop complaining about anything or talking about anything that isn't right in the world for fear that i will prod her to think about changing it...

OR:
she will change the world.

i hope it's the 2nd one.

and the below isn't all that related to the above but it's just a thought that i resonate with and agree with wholeheartedly. it's how i want us to parent Keira and any other kids God blesses us with...

(This was originally posted to renown on November 16, 2009 under the title "Friend, do what you came to do.")

wow. I read those words this morning and the floored me. I haven't gotten them out of my mind all day. (I've probably read them many times before, but for some reason today they grabbed me...)

I've been reading through the gospels over and over and over for a while. I was about to finish Matthew again this morning when I got knocked over by that phrase Jesus said.
It was when Judas came with his posse to betray Jesus. He says "W'sup Rabbi" & then kisses Him to greet Him and also point Him out. Then Jesus said it...
"FRIEND... do what you came to do."

Are you kidding me? FRIEND? Obviously Jesus knew what He was doing there. 1) because... well, He's Jesus & 2) because He straight up says "do what you came to do." so He know Judas is selling Him out.

And He still calls him friend. I couldn't help but think HOW DIFFERENT Jesus' response is compared to His followers' response when people wrong them. how different Jesus' response is from my response when peeps betray me, wrong me, sell me out, etc... I'm usually not calling them friend.
I think it's obvious that we don't follow Jesus in this kind of love because I grabbed a commentary on Matthew that happened to be nearby. It's a famous NT commentary from a famous commentator that most peeps would know if I said his name... He wrote for pages on this passage but NEVER ONCE said anything about how awesomely loving and kind and gracious it was for Jesus to call Judas "friend". He only talked about how those were the last words Judas heard Jesus say and how those words will ring in his ears while he's burning for an eternity in hell. hmmm... shows where we are as Christians I guess if that's our reaction.

but I just say -*What radical grace and love! I've been overwhelmed by it all day. What if I lived this way? What if ALL of us followers of Jesus lived this way? the way Jesus lived... what a novel idea.

Not to mention just across the page Jesus washed Judas' feet the night before he betrayed Him. Wrote a research paper on that one time and was also overwhelmed by Jesus' unconditional love for someone we would want to hate.

this week i've been writing about the idea that love wins.

no matter what is happening in the world, in your life, and no matter what is done to you... love wins.

but it's hard to live that way. and i believe that Jesus knows better than anyone how hard this is.
because Jesus was ridiculed, hated, mocked... and He had a choice of how He would respond to all this. He chose love every time.

He could have picked up a rock and fought back. He could have spit back in their face. but He never once became the evil that was thrown at Him. You never read about Jesus saying "just give me a little time and I'll get even." He never once responds back with what's been done to Him.

and Jesus changed the world.
people who live like this... like love wins... change the world!
because love defeated evil.

& love still beats evil. evil can never beat evil. only love wins.


somebody has to LOVE to stop the madness. there's an evil cycle and we all contribute to it when we get revenge, fight back, etc... but when we love - love wins & the evil stops. the world changes.

so yes, it's hard. but isn't it worth it to change the world. the only other alternative is the same way everyone else lives. you see where that gets us.

is the world any different because of you?

(This is a repost from Monday, June 9, 2008.)

"As soon as Judas took the bread, Satan entered into him. So Jesus told him, 'What you are about to do, do quickly.' But no one at the meal understood why Jesus said this to him. Since Judas had charge of the money, some thought Jesus was telling him to buy what was needed for the festival, or to give something to the poor." (John 14:27-29)

You may have read this passage hundreds of times. Obviously, the main story in this passage is Jesus' last supper with his closest disciples, but I read this and was STRUCK with a thought.

Think about it, Jesus and the boys are sitting around eating dinner. Jesus tells Judas to hurry up and do his thing. The other guys weren't in on the prior conversation so they didn't know exactly what Jesus was telling Judas to go do... BUT they just assumed Jesus was telling Judas to buy some supplies OR go out and give something to help some poor people!

Man, I LOVE this!!! Here's what it tells me about Jesus. He was the kind of guy who would just stop in the middle of dinner & go out and give something to the poor! He must have done that before many times because that's just what his disciples assumed was happening.

Doesn't that sound crazy to us though!?! Imagine you're at your family's Thanksgiving dinner this year and the food smells awesome and the turkey has been carved. You take a few bites and then stand up and say "I'll see you guys later, I'ma run out and feed some poor people." Or imagine you're at your next lunch staff meeting and right in the middle of it the boss says "OK guys, let's go out and help the homeless guys downtown."

That's just the kind of guy Jesus was & I LOVE it. I wanna be like that. More concerned about the poor around me than my own comfort, or eating my dinner, or following dinner etiquette.

(Check out my next post and I'm gonna tell you about a friend of mine who is doing something along these lines. Jesus is pretty stoked about it too.)

no doubt Jesus' words in Matthew 25:31-46 are pretty intense. i've talked about them a lot. Those words (and many others like them in Scripture) are changing the way we see everything.

To sum up - basically Jesus said that when we help the hungry, thirsty, foreigners, poor, and prisoners it's just like we're helping Jesus Himself. When we ignore them we're dissing Jesus. it's a very sobering talk from Jesus.

Yesterday i read about half of A Hole In Our Gospel by the President of World Vision, Richard Stearns. When he was talking about this passage his paraphrase almost knocked me down. i literally had to go and sit down and write some thoughts.

After reading the passage from Matthew he gave his contemporary paraphrase:

Dan Kimball wrote a great book a while back called They Like Jesus But Not the Church. he probably could have written another one called "They Like Jesus But Not Christians". because that's true of A LOT of people.

here are just a few:
“I’m a big fan of Jesus. I’m not a big fan of those who work for Him.” – Bill Maher (the guy from Politically Incorrect)

i have no idea what's in someone's heart, but i'll go ahead and say that probably 1 out of 4 of those guys are/were believers in Jesus. but they all like Jesus! Christians are turning away thousands (maybe millions) of people from Jesus who actually like Jesus to begin with.

it shouldn't be this way. and that bad part is that i tend to agree with these 4 guys.

but what can we do? recognize it 1st of all then...

be more like Jesus. act more like Jesus. live more like Jesus.

that's a pretty good start.

These 2 people live in Bulgeta, Ethiopia. i don't know their names. They are getting water to drink. Every single person in the town drinks the water from this pond.

I showed this picture to my wife and she had no idea it was even water. She said she thought the people were playing in a sand box. that made me want to cry.

There is no reason anyone in our world should still be dying from unclean water... but several died from unclean water since you've been reading this. that's messed up.

Thankfully some other people thought it was messed up too. They gave to Charity:Water (an awesome org. that i love) and they built a clean water well in Bulgeta! These 2 people never have to visit this pond again. People from this town won't die from unclean water anymore.
*Because some people were generous. They thought the future for this town should be different so they did something about it.

you can read more about this town and water project HERE and there are even links that will take you to the google earth coordinates to see these villages who have been helped in Ethiopia!