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What stirs the deepest response in me is loss. Its effects on people, especially kids. I lost my brother when I was 15 (he was 17), my first baby, and the number of young friends and family whose grave I have stood beside now far outnumber all the available fingers and toes I have to count on. Jesus wept – not a few delicate graceful tears rolling serenely down His peaceful cheeks, but the loud wails and deep sobs of middle eastern mourning. Yet He knew He was only 10 minutes from raising Lazarus from the dead. So why the tears?
I wrote this on my blog recently: “I think He wept for the pain He saw. He broke His heart over the love and brokenness of the friends around Him who wept for Lazarus. He wept for the separation, the anger, the confusion, the terrible ache. He wept because the children He made were hurting and hurting badly with their sense of loss. They called Him “man of sorrows, acquainted with grief.” And I don’t think He only wept once in His life somehow. I suspect He wept more tears than could fill an ocean, His heart broken by His compassionate care for the ones He loved so much.”
So far for me that has not been something I respond to by forming an organisation, but it’s a one on one care for the people I know and meet. And boy there are a lot of them that cross my path. Wrecked for platitudes, wrecked for not feeling, this one runs deep in my heart probably exactly because it has hurt me so badly and so often. “God comforts us in our troubles so that we can comfort those in trouble with the comfort we ourselves have received from God. For just as the sufferings of Christ flow over into our lives, so also through Christ our comfort overflows.” (2 Cor 1:4-5)
Prostitution of any kind, willing or not, breaks my heart, Seth. Seeing women not know their identity, led alone walk in it, breaks my heart, period! I feel like I am tied up in a stall and can’t get out… some would call it the pruning season. Whatever it is, know that I am standing in prayer and fasting UNTIL God releases me. Then watch out world b/c I’m pissed!
We need to live with broken hearts about sexual sin of all kinds.I remember speaking to a Thai young adult who had been a male prostitute for mostly European patrons the better part of a decade. He follows Jesus now. It’s not hard to excite and incite people by problems. They are global and everywhere. The real challenge is to have a “God birthed” plan (not some avant garde “cause for the moment”) which motivates honest intention toward results oriented action. Christian culture is fad driven and filled with spiritual attention defecit. It’s also often fueled by a “chasing of the money”. Watch the number of Evangelical nonprofits created in the years ahead focusing on the environment.
The reason I love you, Karen and AIM is that you are neither.
Stay the course…..
Butch
my problems dont arent big at all when i read about this.
That’s because your foreign policy dictates that your leaders support despots who have brought missery to their own people. Kleptocracies who line their pockets with blood money from taxes and kickbacks from foreign aid-which was supposed to alleviate the suffering of these peoples. So long as your people benefit from another countries cheap goods and services, your leaders will support them. It’s really sad. That’s why the whole world rooted for Mr. Obama…the promise of change. If you mus be a friend, be a friend of the people-not despots who would be willing to sacrifice their people to fight your wars. My country’s gov’t was so callous as to pocket rice donations from Vietnam for calamity victims. Maybe you should as well right off our loans as a nation as you did with Pakistan…we never beneffited from it anyway. Be that as it may, I am hoping you get out of your economic woes as a better people. Maybe it is God’s way of letting you experience the suffering of poor nations who have suffered through the mismanagement of their leaders with your support. God bless America.