Invisible Children: The Rescue

I just came from Point Loma's showing of Invisible Children: The Rescue. It's a new Invisible Children movie supporting a massive campaign to set free the children abducted by Joseph Kony, the leader of the Lord's Resistance Army of northern Uganda. The Rescue event takes place on the 25th of April and there are various events and means of supporting the event that precede it. But the rescue itself is a day much like the Night Commuters or Displace Me campaigns run by Invisible Children where participants dramatize and attempt to empathize with the effected children of Uganda, except the Rescue event ends with us actually being rescued. The rescue comes from politicians, celebrities, and I suppose various other people of authority involved in the issue.

And maybe that's why I am struggling right now with making a decision to be involved or what to do to be involved. And I mean, how can I say that, right? Being given this information, watching this movie depicting people with disfigured faces and bodies, of course I should do something. Maddie, you've always wondered how you would have reacted to the Holocaust and now you have one right in front of you and you are reluctant? I mean it's only three dollars a week, it's only 2 nights, and I can do more than that!

It's just that as I fill out the form stating that I want to be involved with this Rescue, I can't help but think how foolish it is that this Rescue is coming from politicians and celebrities. We've got to stop thinking that Bono is Jesus.

But it happened before. World War II is over. Jesus didn't come down here and stop that, people got involved and it was really messy, but in the end, Nazis stopped killing Jews (in a mass, organized way anyway). It took politicians to end WW2. Have I no hope? Have I no hope that God can use our generation, our celebrities, our politicians to end something that God hates?

It's just so big. I like what I am doing now at church. I like that I can see the way things are changing for Jose, Precious, Yacksi, Burto. I like that I can see something that I am involved in change these kids a bit. I want to support everything that brings God's justice to the world, that preaches Torah, that preaches the gospel. But can I support everything? And is this supporting it?

I don't know why I feel so unsure of this. I wrote a blog to sort it out, but please, please offer me any advice, thoughts, or words.

http://www.invisiblechildren.com/ to get more info.

Thought necklace: a string of thoughts loosely bound together

At this point, I reckon that life is a lot about living in the tension of things. Some people may think of Christianity as an escape from the tension. They think, "My faith gives me all the answers; my faith tells me who to be." When really our faith gives us one more tension: living in the world and the kingdom of God. There is really not one thing we should always be; there is no mantra, no costume that we can wear that morphs us into invincible superheroes, no monastery that frees us from the tension.

One might say, "Well, we are called to be faithful, therefore we must always strive to be obedient disciples." I completely agree, but often times we don't know what exactly it means to be obedient, and if we do, we find that being obedient means acting differently in different situations. Sometimes we should give, sometimes we should save, sometimes we should comfort, sometimes we should confront. All this is living in the tension.

I think that's why it's hard for people to believe that God loves them. There's a certain ease to life that comes with love. There's protection, safety, belonging, and trust. Yet we know that life is not easy. There are situations that make us feel unprotected, unsafe, alone, and untrusting. How do we live in the blessing of God's love and the suffering of the world? Where do we rightly find God's love?

I try to think of what makes we worthwhile. Is it my gifts and abilities? My performance? My personality? My family? My church? My relationships? My faith? As of now the only thing that I can really conceptualize and say, "Yes, this is why I matter" is the fact that I am created. That for one moment (or whatever the heavenly, timeless word there is for moment) God thought that I was a good idea. That goes for everything else created as well. Which means that even the five year-old kid with terminal cancer, even the still-born baby, even the 24-weeker in the NICU, even the person who will never attend a "normal" school, hold a "normal" job, or be able to function "normally" in society, even to those God shows that it was right, it was good, it was better for them to be created than not. I couldn't tell you why, and I will never try to. But I believe that anything created (even anything not alive) was not a mistake and was put together with love, care, and intention. It's kind of a bold statement if you think about it. It's kind of life-changing too.

Resolutions (same old, same old)

1. Be a friend.
2. Be healthier.
3. Be prettier.
4. Be happier.

Carbon Dioxide: Breathe This

Without sin, without feeling;
without pain, without hope.
So, you are not hopeless
for we can only hope;
it is only because of hope that you can know your despair.

You are not without God!:
because you have pain,
because you have hope
and for this creation groans.

So here we are. Not hopeless, but faithless.
faithless that things will change.
how can things change?

Effortlessly.
wind is wind.
ice is ice.
sun is sun.

winter is winter.
summer is summer.

Not effortlessly.
Tree is blown.
Tree is barren.
Tree is grown.

Persevere.
Persevere.
Persevere.

Dear God,

Where is peace? Where is freedom? Where is joy?

if my mind and heart could vomit every thought infecting it, it would look something like this. clean up on asile 2. bring the sawdust.

What can it mean to be Christian and not to be part of the world? How do you be Christian in the world? What came first the world or Christianity, is one defined as the absence of the other?


Christians often turn to asceticism to separate themselves from the world, but the way I see things, it seems like in America everyone has a bit of asceticism in the name of individuality. Many people religiously deny themselves things in the name of worshiping their identities. People refuse to eat certain food, wear certain clothes, buy certain products, and what not. It's not like these denials are always particularly superficial at all. In fact many come out of the very core of ourselves. My conscience tells me I cannot behave in particular ways and support certain ideas. To thine own self be true right?


I guess that's where my question comes from. The part of the world that I live in tells me that truth can be found anywhere, but the truths are validated by soul, my conscience, my intuition. I have no peace if I don't feel at peace. But what if something untruth gives us peace. Can I be trusted to recognize truth? Or maybe its not really me, maybe it's the holy spirit. Is my gut feeling the holy spirit? How do I know the difference.




In Eden there was not this dualism of world vs church or of sacred vs profane. People were created naked in all their hairy, awkward glory (well actually God's). Things just were; there was no need for jugdemental adjectives. Though for us, Jesus's death on the cross reveals that we are able to become something new from what we were before, we are not really becoming something new as much as we are becoming what we were; what we were intended to be. To find out what holiness and wholeness looks like perhaps we do not need to look forward as much as we need to look back. And looking back brings us back to the time where we did not need to frame things in order to make them Christianly acceptable. When people spoke of love, they mean love that came from God, when they spoke of sex they meant that it was God ordained, an act of obedience, when they spoke of truth it was something really, deeply, inescapably true.

I guess I struggle with wanting these words and behaviors like love, truth, sex, happiness, wholeness to be organic; to be as pure as taking about the creations of mountains and sunsets. But they aren't. Sin is here and it's deceptive and it draws lines between holy and unholy, pure and impure. This is not just a language issue but a need to validate the desire of the heart.

Am I pure? And if not now when? And if I'm not then how can I descern what is true, holy, or good. And if I can't discern sin using my intuition, how can I descern peace?

Hope is the origin of faith

Today our class lecture was about pediatric hematology and oncology. We ended with this documentary about a family who was dealing with their son's losing battle to cancer. Following the son's death there was an interview with the father about his spiritual life. I didn't get the vibe that the father was particularly devout to any certain doctrine through he did say he prayed a lot more. One thing he did say that made me stop and think was, "I really, really hope that there's a better place."

Faith is being sure of what we hope for...

That's what Hebrews 11 says, that faith is the assurance of things hoped for. We are faithless, but never without hope. Faith is something we have to be taught, it's something we have to have modeled as seen through God faithfulness to Israel and through the life and death of Christ. But hope does not need to be taught. Hope is all we know how to do. Even when we say things are hopeless, what we mean that there is no realistic way of ever getting what we really hope for. Hope, hope: our desires, dreams, wishes, yearnings. My hopes have done terrible things to me.

But it's these hopes that lead people to cry out. Like some sort of grassroots prayer, it's people crying out through tears and sighs and frustration saying "this is not what I hope for; this is so far from what I hope for."

Faith is being sure of what we hope for

So faith is taking these hopes and being sure about them. When hopes stop being wished for and start being waited for there is faith. So we take these hopes we have and we look at God and the things God seems to be faithfully working toward and we decide which hopes seem to be worthy of our faith.

I really, really hope that there is a better place.