10% of all
retail sales go to help feed the orphans in Swaziland. All the furniture is handmade, solid
and uniquely crafted to fit your particular space in your home. A couple, Dave and Vicki Gross, once
worked at Adventures in Missions and their hearts were broken when they went to
visit Swaziland. God showed them
how they were to start a business and have a portion of the profits go back to
feeding the poorest of the poor.Find out more about Pine Designs by going to their website or visiting
them on Facebook.
Rehab Mart - click here to by discount rehabilitation and medical supplies
Rehab Mart is an online discount medical equipment and medical supply
company that is owned and operated by Occupational and Physical Therapists. All your medical needs can be found on
at Rehab Mart.
The Sound of Hope- click here to buy a T-shirt!
www.thesoundofhope.org
The proceeds from just one t-shirt is enough to feed an orphan
in Swaziland one meal a day for over a month! The Sound of Hope is a
music-driven campaign that raises money and awareness for orphans in Swaziland,
Kenya, and India. Find out more by finding our fan page and group on Facebook, or
add us as a friend on myspace!
Corridor of Hope - click here to buy handmade jewelry and
beautiful silk scarves from Thailand and India!
www.corridorofhope.org
At Corridor Of Hope we are devoted to connecting orphans,
poverty stricken communities and YOU. We are the corridor, a passageway to help
people who can't help themselves. We help bring them hope by bringing you
quality and affordable products from these countries. In turn, Corridor Of Hope
will donate these resources back into their communities by supporting orphans,
thereby empowering YOU to help in a multifaceted way. We will bring you updates
and newsletters regarding the orphans and how your purchase made a difference
in their lives.
Timbali Crafts- click here to buy a handmade African purse from
Swaziland!
www.timbalicrafts.org
TIMBALI CRAFTS are created by women who work as volunteer cooks
at feeding centers for orphans in Swaziland, Africa, where over 40% of the
population is HIV positive.
Many of the women have been widowed
or abandoned, are single mothers, or grandmothers (called "gogos")
raising grandchildren that have been orphaned. Craft sales help provide an
income for these hard working women and their families who would otherwise have
little or none. This past week was pay day for the gogos in the Nsoko
area who sew the purses and table runners.
Finally, let me encourage you to copy
this blog onto your own and spread the word!
Here's a blog from my son in Haiti. As we dig through the rubble, we uncover stuff that wants to stay buried.
A man named Ramseys recently took a group of us to his home that was
destroyed in the quake. We walked into the enclosed area with the
mountain of rubble that was his home and glanced around at bits of
furniture, walls, doors and other things that piled up on the ground.
"I was not home in the
afternoon of January 12th," he told us. "It is not easy to talk about
this. My dad was here, though, with my sister and her kid. This is where
they found my dad," he said, pointing. "It is not easy to talk about
this, he repeated. He was eating dinner. They pulled my sister out here.
Her son was tucked under her arm. They were both dead. It is not easy
to talk about this."
I envisioned what it must have been like, as
the ground started to shake. She probably grabbed her son and didn't
know what to do but hold him close. It wasn't long before the house
collapsed around them. And as it did, she shielded her son with her own
body.
"How do you do it?" one of the girls on the team asked
Ramsey through tears. "How do you continue to follow God?"
I
don't remember all that he said, but one thing did stick with me. "This
is life."
This man gets
brokenness and death as a huge part of life that most of us don't.
I've
been realizing more and more recently how broken humanity is. The
reality I grew up with in America shows me that darkness in my society
is covered and hidden deep within. It's kept hidden in our injured
hearts by clever wit, snippy sass, passive aggression and sarcasm that
cuts at people's insecurities. Somehow we feel better by putting others
down. Here's a phrase I like, "Hurt people hurt people."
We're
all human, though, injured by the humanity of others. We may be trying
to recover, but too afraid of being hurt again to trust another. Some
may hurt us, but I know a good amount of people who thrive on bringing
life and inner healing to others.
I challenge you to be
vulnerable. Find a safe, trustworthy person and talk about the pain
that's hard to even mention. There is strength and healing on the other
side of pain, a light at the end of the tunnel.
It's so hard to see, much less get rid of, all the things that have taken up space in our hearts - space that God
himself wants to fill. We may sense, but often can't see the way various
attachments crowd out the abundant life that God wants to give us. That car you take such good care of may, in a way, keep you from sponsoring an orphan through World Vision.
And you may feel a vague angst about your life without even connecting the dots - you sense something is off, but don't know what. The angst may be immobilizing, incapacitating even. And without knowing what to do, all you may sense is, "I need to make a change."
Abandon is the process of taking our hands
off of those things that we have clutched to our breast. It is a process
that involves turning away from them and renouncing rights to them. It
is an emptying that clears away emotional space for new attachments.
Because
we in America have so many things cluttering our lives, it's hard to
know what keeps us connected to the identity we present to the world - our false self. The obvious things are
clear enough: the addictions, the broken relationships, the stuff that
fills our garage. But behind all that is no less an array of attachments
that may keep us locked down in a spiritual or emotional prison that we can't see.
Attitudes
and habits are often invisible to the person who owns them. You may
laugh at Debbie Downer on Youtube, but be the last one to see how your
wet-blanket comments keep people at arms length. Your cynicism may win
you other cynical friends, but prevent you from getting to a place of
intimacy with them.
Perhaps the most invisible of
attachments, those most difficult to perceive, are those that are
culturally defined. If all your friends are spending their evenings on
the computer, for example, you may not see the way in which it limits
your emotional range. Leave your own culture behind and you may be
amazed at the things you thought you needed but really don't. It may
blow your mind when you visit Mozambique to see that when the mothers run out
of milk for their babies, they pass them on to their friends to
breastfeed. You may find yourself charmed by the simplicity of life in
many other countries. You may wonder about the choices you made that got
you to such a dissatisfyingly complex lifestyle before you left.
And
because we may have so many things crowding out the life of God
and creating room for the false self in our lives, it's better that we
not try to piecemeal the process of abandon. It's better to do what
Jesus asked of those candidating to be his disciples - leave everything
and do it now. Total abandon requires the leaving of places and
relationships. It requires the quitting of commitments, some potentially
good. And because it requires leaving, a journey is required.
To
onlookers, inevitably this will look reckless. And when what you find
on the journey is pain, it may look downright dumb. But suppose that in fact you may be unable
to see all the things that have you locked into an identity that is false, one based on posing. Let's further suppose that you are committed to discovering who God intended you to be and what
he made you to do. If in fact these are true, then this process of reckless abandon that takes you on a
journey away from home and comfort may be the smartest, bravest thing you ever do.
Yes, you may meet sickness, robbers, and random misfortune
along the way. That's the price of going along a narrow path that has
just one safety net - God himself. But as you set your feet on that path, you commit to finding your true self and to a life defined by faith. You
commit yourself to living a life where your life's priorities match God's.
At times in my life, I've felt like such a loser. I've felt like I was losing the things I held dear. Losing my job, losing my income, losing my sense of self-respect. And I couldn't help
drawing the conclusion that maybe God didn't want me to be happy.
Does God want us to be happy? Yes, of course. The Bible tells us that he wants us to prosper. "Beloved, I pray that you may prosper in all things and be in health, just as your soul prospers." (3 John 2-4) But what does that mean?
Some preachers take verses like that and emphasize a
"name-it-claim-it" theology. They say that God wants us to be
prosperous, as in he wants us to have lots of stuff. I don't think that's the way God works. Aside from the fact that a great many Bible passages warn us of the problem of having a bunch of stuff, I see a more basic problem.
Prosperity theology is all about filling - fill your wallet, fill your garage, fill your shopping list. But it has little to
say about emptying, about the process of losing. The problem is that so much of God's work in our lives is the work of emptying. He want to get us to drop the useless things that fill our hands and hearts. He wants us to drop the habits that cause heartache and take us away from our purpose in life.
Try to think of an example in Scripture where a man
of God didn't go through brokenness and emptying before God's purpose was revealed in him.
Common sense tells you that things must be emptied before they can be
filled. And if it's true in the physical realm, all the more in the
spiritual realm.
It's counterintuitive that you would pray for intimacy and that God would respond by moving you toward brokenness. If that's divine love, then we'd all be excused for praying instead that God just ignore us. But moving us to brokenness is an act of grace. We're already broken - he's just helping us to recognize that. The state of brokenness is when you see what was dysfunctional all along.
When we
understand that he's simply getting us to let loose of the grip we have on cheap stuff that we'll one day just throw away, we can see his emptying process for what it is - an act of love.
World Racers are in the top 10% of their generation in many ways. Out of every 10 applications or inquiries we get, one goes on the race. They are hungry, committed, and very sharp.
Yet look at where they are coming from. At our training camp, out of the 150 racers we have with us this week, over HALF of them have
been physically or sexually abused at some point in their lives.
It happens behind closed doors, so people don't talk about it. But in private, before God, desiring healing, they self-identify.
While we adults obsess about politics and the obvious issues that make the front page of the newspaper, our children are being abused. While we try to protect them from life's pain, we're failing them in the most basic of ways. And worst of all, we don't even know it has happened! We're ignorant of our children's pain.
If you're a parent of two or more grown children as Karen and I are, the odds are, at least one of them has been abused and never told you about it. They're ashamed or perhaps you've never created the opening for them to share the secret that they've buried down deep.
It's horrific and it demands a response. And the questions we parents need to ask ourselves are, "What is my response? What am I going to do about it?"
When God speaks to you, does he ever tell you things that blow your mind? In the Bible he's always talking to his people and telling them stuff that is outside of their paradigm of life. It's so fantastic that they can't fully digest it. They come away incredulous and stuttering.
Jonah couldn't handle the call to Nineveh. "Just kill me now, Lord!
I'd rather be dead than alive if what I predicted will not happen." (Jonah 4:3)
Moses couldn't handle the call to lead a nation. "O Lord, please send someone else to do it." (Ex. 4:13)
Isaiah encountered God and said, "Woe to me! I am ruined! For I am a man of
unclean lips." (Is. 6:5)
Peter was discombobulated on the mount of Transfiguration, initially terrified, then babbling on about building booths. (Matt. 17:4-6)
Has God ever blown your mind? Does he have the right to? When God speaks to you and asks you to do something that
is going to cost you like it cost Paul when he deputized him to go as a
missionary to the people he'd been terrorizing, how will you respond?
When Jesus told his disciples he was giving them authority to cast out demons, heal the sick and raise the dead, how do you think they responded? I'll bet the general tone was like Bill Cosby telling the story of Noah
talking to God. Where God tells him about this huge ship he's to build
and Noah says, "Right!"
How will you respond to God when he tells you to do something so impossible that only he can do it through you?
Pastor Jean Claude Belchet was under the rubble for two hours - he couldn't breathe and thought he was going to die. He made it out, but his wife and two children didn't. Still, he soldiers on. Here is his harrowing story.
Want to see God move? God is moving in Haiti and the churches that go there from the States are experiencing it first hand. Here's a video that shows how a church in San Diego partnered up with a church in Port-au-Prince.
Yours can do the same. Go here to find out more about how.
What's your life vision? We need one to get through life with some sense of purpose. Living just to eat, just to survive, is not living. Animals do that. God made us in his image as noble creatures with great creative ability. Take a few minutes to write your vision down. This one comes from 24-7 Prayer.
The Vision
So this guy comes up to me and says "what's the vision? What's the big
idea?" I open my mouth and words come out like this... The vision?
The vision is JESUS - obsessively, dangerously, undeniably Jesus.
The vision is an army of young people.
You see bones? I see an army. And they are FREE from materialism.
They laugh at 9-5 little prisons. They could eat caviar on Monday and
crusts on Tuesday. They wouldn't even notice. They know the meaning of
the Matrix, the way the west was won. They are mobile like the wind,
they belong to the nations. They need no passport.. People write their
addresses in pencil and wonder at their strange existence. They are free
yet they are slaves of the hurting and dirty and dying. What is the
vision ? The vision is holiness that hurts the eyes. It makes children
laugh and adults angry. It gave up the game of minimum integrity long
ago to reach for the stars. It scorns the good and strains for the best.
It is dangerously pure.
Light flickers from every secret motive, every private conversation. It
loves people away from their suicide leaps, their Satan games. This is
an army that will lay down its life for the cause. A million times a day
its soldiers
choose to lose that they might one day win the great 'Well done' of
faithful sons and daughters.
Such heroes are as radical on Monday morning as Sunday night. They don't
need fame from names. Instead they grin quietly upwards and hear the
crowds chanting again and again: "COME ON!"
And this is the sound of the underground The whisper of history in the
making Foundations shaking Revolutionaries dreaming once again Mystery
is scheming in whispers Conspiracy is breathing... This is the sound of
the underground
And the army is discipl(in)ed.
Young people who beat their bodies into submission.
Every soldier would take a bullet for his comrade at arms. The tattoo on
their back boasts "for me to live is Christ and to die is gain".
Sacrifice fuels the fire of victory in their upward eyes. Winners.
Martyrs. Who can stop them ? Can hormones hold them back? Can failure
succeed? Can fear scare them or death kill them ?
And the generation prays
like a dying man with groans beyond talking, with warrior cries,
sulphuric tears and with great barrow loads of laughter! Waiting.
Watching: 24 - 7 - 365.
Whatever it takes they will give: Breaking the rules. Shaking mediocrity
from its cosy little hide. Laying down their rights and their precious
little wrongs, laughing at labels, fasting essentials. The advertisers
cannot mould them. Hollywood cannot hold them. Peer-pressure is
powerless to shake their resolve at late night parties before the
cockerel cries.
They are incredibly cool, dangerously attractive
inside.
On the outside? They hardly care. They wear clothes like costumes to
communicate and celebrate but never to hide. Would they surrender their
image or their popularity? They would lay down their very lives - swap
seats with the man on death row - guilty as hell. A throne for an
electric chair.
With blood and sweat and many tears, with sleepless nights and fruitless
days,
they pray as if it all depends on God and live as if it all depends on
them.
Their DNA chooses JESUS. (He breathes out, they breathe in.) Their
subconscious sings. They had a blood transfusion with Jesus. Their words
make demons scream in shopping centres. Don't you hear them coming?
Herald the weirdo's! Summon the losers and the freaks. Here come the
frightened and forgotten with fire in their eyes. They walk tall and
trees applaud, skyscrapers bow, mountains are dwarfed by these children
of another dimension. Their prayers summon the hounds of heaven and
invoke the ancient dream of Eden.
I like the story where the king of Israel asks Elisha
about the army attacking them. Elisha responds, "Don't be afraid; those who
are with us are more than those who are with them." (2 Kings 6:16-17)
What! What was he talking
about? No one was with them! They were about to be overwhelmed by a
vicious army. My knees would be knocking and I'd be praying the last rites over myself. But Elisha sees something and prays, "O God, open his eyes so he may see."
Wow, what a great prayer. Something else was going on that the king just couldn't see. There isn't a day that goes by that I don't need to be praying that prayer. "O God, open my eyes so I can see."
Then the Lord opened the king's eyes and he saw "the hills
full of horses and chariots of fire all around Elisha." That was
reality, he just needed to have his eyes of faith opened. And, of course, we are
no different.
What impossible situation do you need to see through the
eyes of faith? As I often say, we are not human beings having a spiritual experience, we're spiritual beings having a temporary human experience. The problem we have to confront is that we've been using our five senses and our rational mind so long that it's hard to perceive the world through any other lens.
Our perception is askew if not broken. Unless we switch on our spirit inside and see through the eyes of faith, we're doomed to go through life missing the spiritual big picture. And sadly, I think most of us do miss it.
Jesus had a heck of a time training his disciples to see this way. "Stop judging by mere appearances," he admonished them.
Earlier, he had told them, "The Son can do nothing by himself. He can only do what he sees the Father doing," (John 5:19). Jesus himself was limited to what he could see happening in the Spirit realm.
But the disciples struggled as we do. When Jesus tells them to feed the great crowd following them, Philip processes the situation through his rational mind and declares, "Eight months wages would not buy enough bread for each one to have a bite!" He needed to open his spiritual eyes and see what God was doing.
So again I ask, what problem are you seeing through your physical eyes? What army is surrounding you? Isn't it time you acted like the son or daughter of the Most High God that you are and ask him what he is doing in that situation? We need to open our spiritual eyes and stop judging by mere appearances. Life is too short. Without the eyes of faith - that is, without our spiritual eyes open - Scripture tells us, it's impossible to please God. (Heb. 11:6).
Pine Designs - 
Rehab Mart - 
The Sound of Hope
Corridor of Hope 
Timbali Crafts
"I was not home in the
afternoon of January 12th," he told us. "It is not easy to talk about
this. My dad was here, though, with my sister and her kid. This is where
they found my dad," he said, pointing. "It is not easy to talk about
this, he repeated. He was eating dinner. They pulled my sister out here.
Her son was tucked under her arm. They were both dead. It is not easy
to talk about this."
It's so hard to see, much less get rid of, all the things that have taken up space in our hearts - space that God
himself wants to fill. We may sense, but often can't see the way various
attachments crowd out the abundant life that God wants to give us. That car you take such good care of may, in a way, keep you from sponsoring an orphan through World Vision.
At times in my life, I've felt like such a loser. I've felt like I was losing the things I held dear. Losing my job, losing my income, losing my sense of self-respect. And I couldn't help
drawing the conclusion that maybe God didn't want me to be happy. 
World Racers are in the top 10% of their generation in many ways. Out of every 10 applications or inquiries we get, one goes on the race. They are hungry, committed, and very sharp.
I like the story where the king of Israel asks Elisha
about the army attacking them. Elisha responds, "Don't be afraid; those who
are with us are more than those who are with them." (2 Kings 6:16-17)