Shouldn't We Just Send Money?

(This is something I wrote back in 2005)

A friend of mine at work just returned from a church-sponsored mission trip to Honduras. He described it as “the best trip I’ve ever been on!” He showed me many digital pictures from his trip showing how they built simple houses for people there. People of all ages went including many retirees and teenagers with some doing construction and some teaching a vacation Bible school for Honduran children. One couple that went had been sponsoring a child in Honduras by mail for a while and got to meet “their” child in person. The smiles of delighted children were prominent in many pictures. He showed a picture of himself with his arm around a Honduran teenager with the teenager wearing his hat and sunglasses. My friend had given them as a gift to the teenager right before they left to return home. When was the last time you spent $900 dollars of your own money and used a week of your precious vacation time to go bang nails all day in the hot, tropical sun for people you just met? When was the last time I spent $900 of my own money and a week of my vacation time to go bang nails in the hot, tropical sun for people I just met? I know my answer is “never.”

My own church regularly sends people on mission work trips to a girl’s orphanage in Chile and I have only heard glowing comments from the people who return. If there was any sadness in their remarks, it was that they could not provide even more help. One guy told of eating a meal with the girls where the main dish was chicken. After dinner, he ventured back into the kitchen to find the girls and house mother picking the little pieces of chicken left uneaten off of the bones. Nothing could be wasted. They would put this small amount of left over in soup at another meal. This big, burly guy talked about how now before he goes to sleep in the States at night, he wonders if the girls (who he now knows by name) got enough to eat that night.

I can hear the naysayers now. “Wouldn’t those people in Honduras or Chile be better off if all those Americans did not go down in person but instead sent the cost of their airfare, hotel, meals, etc. to those people?”

I think the naysayers are missing something. Yes, from a short-term, purely economic point of view they may be right. However, their attitude seems to be based on the assumption that only the physical needs of the poor in Honduras matter.

What about the spiritual needs of the person who makes the journey? If they had only sent their money:

• Would they have learned how much faith other people around the world must have to face such hardship and still be happy?
• Would the traveler have learned to be grateful for the many blessings they have already received in life and so often take for granted?
• Would the traveler learn the lesson about what things really are necessities? and how it is possible to be happy with little?
• Would those teenagers be the same kind of husband, wife, or parent in their future if they had not had this opportunity to give to someone in person who really appreciates it... and cannot return the favor?
• How will the world be different if enough Americans have faces with names in their memories and wonder if the person they met had enough to eat today?

What about the spiritual needs of the people in Honduras?

• Would they have learned that when Jesus is actively at work in the lives of someone “rich” they don’t look down on the poor?
• Would those children in the vacation Bible school that week gotten the same life lesson if they had not seen that all those “rich” people who could have been lounging around at the beach for fun would rather come tell them about Jesus while swatting tropical insects?
• If the lady who had a house built for her were to improve her financial situation later in life, would she be as generous face-to-face to those poorer than her if she had not seen the example of those Americans coming to help her when they could have stayed home and pretended she didn’t exist from 2000 miles away?

I think I’m missing something. What about you?

Make a Loan and Change a Life

A few weeks ago I was reading my local newspaper, The Tennessean, and saw an article about the most recent Nobel Prize in Economics. I learned that Muhammad Yunus, who got his Ph.D . from Vanderbilt University here in Nashville in 1971 received the Nobel Prize for his work combating poverty through the use of "microcredit" or "microloans".

Yunus’ concept of microcredit – small loans to poor villagers in Bangladesh to help them buy livestock or fund an enterprise, has grown from $27 he loaned out of his own pocket into the Grameen Bank, which has loaned more than $5.7 billion to 6.61 million borrowers. Despite lack of collateral or signed loan documents, 99 percent of the loans have been paid back. The Grameen Bank provides services in more than 71,000 villages in Bangladesh through 2,226 branches.

Just a few days ago I was channel surfing and stumbled upon a Frontline story Uganda: A Little Goes a Long Way which showed how an organization called Kiva was using the internet to connect people like me with deserving entrepreneurs in far away places. The response to this TV show was overwhelming as their website was swamped and inaccessible for several days. The website finally came back up and I was able to make my first "microloan" Saturday night. I used my credit card to loan $25 to Ariola Sánchez, a retailer in Guayaquil, Ecuador. Kiva pooled my $25 along with loans from 9 others to fully funded her request for a $250 business loan to purchase an inventory for resale.

Kiva is not a religious organization but I could tell that many of the entrepreneurs who benefit from the loans are Christian. One of the items Ariola sells, for examples, is Bibles. I encourage my readers to visit the Kiva website with their credit card handy.

U2's Bono on Old Testament Prophetic Scriptures

U2 Rock Star Bono recently spoke at the National Prayer Breakfast on Feb 2nd. See Bono Waxes 'Prophetic' on the Christianity Today website.

God Uses Imperfect People

God can and often does use imperfect people to accomplish his purposes.

Look at the lineage of Jesus in Matthew 1:3. “Judah the father of Perez and Zerah, whose mother was Tamar.” Read Genesis 38 about how Judah fathered Perez with his daughter-in-law Tamar. She dressed up as a prostitute to get pregnant when Judah had money to spend after selling the wool from his sheep. David committed adultery with Bathsheba. (II Samuel chapter 11) David had her husband Euriah put in the front lines of battle to make sure he got killed to cover his sin. Yet God chose to have Jesus come from the “house of David.” Note that in Matthew 1:6 “David was the father of Solomon, whose mother had been Uriah's wife.” While the child David fathered while Uriah was alive died, the sinners David and Bathsheba are still in the lineage of Christ through their son Solomon!

There are other well-known examples.

Before becoming a great Christian evangelist spreading the word of Christ, the apostle Paul was called Saul and he traveled around trying to destroy Christianity (Acts 8).

Abrahm lied telling one king that his beautiful wife Sarai was his sister, because he didn’t trust God to protect him. He was afraid they would kill him to take Sarai for themselves. (Genesis 12:10-20) Later Abrahm was Abraham and he told yet another king the same lie about his wife Sarah, again not trusting God to protect him. (Genesis 20) He told the same lie twice and both time failed to trust in God’s protection!

Peter was able to walk on water until he took his eyes off Jesus and looked at the wind and waves instead. (Matthew 14:25-31) Peter also denied Christ three times.

Moses killed a man and you know how God used him. I hope you will let God use you too!

Another “imperfect person” thought. My church had a pastor who spent time as a missionary on Guam and had served successfully at several churches. Along the way, he helped many come to know Jesus. Also along the way, he also started getting emotional attachments to women in his congregation. At a minimum, he committed some kind of emotional adultery. He wound up getting asked to resign from my church in disgrace. I traded emails shortly later with a missionary our church was sponsoring. (This man was planning to enter a Muslim country where it was illegal to preach Christianity.) I mentioned this rather ugly preacher situation to him and he responded with an insightful statement. “Whatever God accomplished through Brother XXX is still valid. Those people are still saved!” We have no power on our own. God works through us. Even if we later screw up, it was still God working… and can work through us again.

You comments are welcome and encouraged!

Are You Safer With the 11 Homeless Men?

I had a whirlwind experience the week before last in which I think God was trying to tell me something and prod me in the direction of ministry towards the homeless.

I am an adult Sunday School teacher at my church, rotating every third week. My spot in the rotation happened to fall on Sunday, January 1, 2006. About five days ahead of time, I decided that I had better get serious about preparing what I was going to say. I dug out the “Exploring the Bible” material we are using from Lifeway and began reading the teacher’s material. This week’s lesson was based on Romans 12:1-8. I was struck by the first verse:

Romans 12:1 (Holman Christian Standard Bible)
A Living Sacrifice
1 Therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, I urge you (A) to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, (B) holy and pleasing to God; this is your spiritual worship. [a]

I found myself trying to think of what it meant to “present your bodies as a living sacrifice.” I came up with several angles to discuss including

• taking care of your body for it is the Temple of the Holy Spirit
• providing acts of service to serve God, and
• being physically present where and when God needs you to be.

After making a first pass through the material, I decided to take a diversion and go check my email. I didn’t have any personal email messages, but I did have an email newsletter from “Christianity Today Daily Newsletter-HTML” that caught my attention. The subject line read “Philip Yancey: What the Homeless Taught Me About Prayer – CTDirect”. Philip Yancey is the author of one of my favorite books, What’s So Amazing About Grace. Also, several members of my Sunday School class are active in the “Room at the Inn” program at my church in which we let homeless men sleep on our gym floor one night a week during the cold winter months. So... I decided to open the email and take a look.

There were several wonderful quotes in the article which lept out at me as being perfect examples of “providing acts of service” and “being physically present where and where God needs you to be.” Perhaps the most important one was this. Quoting a man named John who had 25 years of experience ministering to the homeless.

John said, "the best ministry I can offer is a long-term relationship. I hope that over the years and decades street people learn to trust me as someone who can handle their secrets. I hope that trust will gradually spill over to God. I tell people who encounter the homeless that eye contact and a listening ear may be more important than food or money or Bible verses. They need to connect in some small way with another human being, someone who sees them as a person of worth."

The article also quoted the experience of Mike Yankoski, a college student who took 5 months off from school to live on the street with the homeless and write the book Under the Overpass. According to Mike, a quarter of the homeless people he knows have an active Christian faith.

The article ended with a wonder short poem by Rainer Maria Rilke.

Make it so the poor are no longerdespised and thrown away.
Look at them standing about—like wildflowers, which have nowhere else to grow.

At this point I was excited that I had something new and not in the Lifeway book to interject into our Sunday School Class discussion on Sunday. I was to get more than I bargained for.

When Sunday, January 1st arrived and I got up to give my lesson on Romans 12:1-8 and facilitate discussion, I read a good portion of the Philip Yancey article. The article had the desired affect and really got some good discussion going. It just so happened that the leader of our “Room at the Inn” ministry was sitting on the back row. She spoke up and asked “Do you know the new thing we’re starting a new thing at “Room at the Inn” tonight? (emphasis on tonight) In fact, I didn’t know anything about it.

She went on to explain that our church had been selected to get the same group of 11 men for 6 weeks in a row who were part of a program called “Odyssey.” This program provides on-going mentoring, training, moral support, etc. to the homeless men and tries to get them off the street into regular jobs and housing. The work with them to get them off their addictions, how to behave in job interviews, skills like getting up everyday on time to get to work, encouragement to stick to jobs they do get (and not quit after two weeks), etc.

This was sounding more and more like “being physically present where and when God needs you to be” and I made a comment, only half joking, that “I guess I was supposed to get that email this week when I did.”

We went on then to talk about some of the other verses in Romans 12:1-8 that talked about “not being conformed to the world” but instead being “transformed by the renewing of your mind.” We talked also about how we as Christians should “not to think of himself more highly than he should think.” Both of these points seemed made to order for the homeless ministry. The homeless no doubt need to “renew their mind” by focusing on God and God’s plan for their lives and we in the church should not look down upon our Christian brothers on the street and judge them.

I read from the Lifeway material a quote that “The safest, most wonderful place in the world is in the will of God.” I turned to them and asked them. “What do you think of that? Is that really true?” There was a lot of head nodding. I then asked “Where are you safer? In the room with those 11 homeless men at Room in the Inn tonight? Or... at home tonight watching football?” I saw several sets of eyes in the class get bigger and we got into a good discussion of what it meant to be “safer” and how God’s view and a worldly view could be quite different.

After the lesson was over and we dismissed with prayer, the leader of our “Room at the Inn” ministry came up and asked me if I would be willing to come back tonight and give a shortened version of the lesson which included our discussion of our bodies as a sacrifice, the renewing of our mind, and not to think to highly of ourselves. I remembered my joke earlier, “I guess I was supposed to get that email this week when I did.” I decided that for whatever reason, God must have wanted me to be with the homeless men that night.

I returned to church that night about 6 PM. The men and the volunteers formed a circle on the gym floor, we said grace, and had dinner. When the men were about finished eating, I got up to give my “shortened version” of the lesson. This group of men had been together for a while in the Odyssey program. As a result, they were not shy at all about talking about their struggles and the influence of God in their lives. As many of them had started their downward spiral due to “running around with the wrong crowd” they had a lot to say about being “transformed vs. conformed” in particular.

Since we as a church were to get the same group of men back for the next several weeks, we went around the dinner table to give our names and to introduce ourselves. I was taken aback at how these men were almost eager to tell their story of their fall. Several made a point to take the blame for their situation on themselves for the poor choices they had made earlier in life. Most also expressed a level of belief in God. Many quoted scripture by memory. I silently accepted Mike Yankoski’s assessment that at least one fourth of the homeless have an active Christian faith as likely to be true and even more so for this Odyssey group in front of me.

Several of the homeless men’s comments resonated with me in particular.

• Several admitted to being alcoholics, with one saying he had been sober for 3 years now. The other homeless men seemed genuinely happy for him in this accomplishment.
  
• Several talked about drugs, especially cocaine.
  
• Some had been in jail.
  
• Several had good jobs and plenty of money before their fall.
  
• One didn’t know where one of his children was.
  
• There were bouts of depression.
  
• Several with multiple divorces.
  
• A couple who went into a downward spiral after a breakup with a wife or girlfriend they really loved.
  
• There were several health problems.
  
• Many cited coming from Christian homes.
  
• One talked about his sour attitude when faced with the prospects of switching from a huge amount of money selling drugs to making only $7 / hour in an honest job. (He talked of being in possession of drugs worth $165,000 on the street.)
• Some were veterans.
  
• A general inability to “stick to things”... for example, getting a job only to quit shortly later.
  
• The all seemed to realize they had squandered opportunities in life.

Each of the volunteers from our church also talked about ourselves. All of them but myself had been working with the homeless for a while and made a point to emphasize that while they may not have “done drugs” or “been in prison” we had our own sins and faults and needed God’s grace too.

A week later, I remembered that comment about “I guess I was supposed to get that email” and my question to my Sunday School class about “Where are you safer? In that room of 11 homeless men?” Some might wonder if I guilted myself into this. Or... was the Holy Spirit really prompting me to get more involved with these men and to be “physically present” and lend an ear “where and when” God needs me to be? I decided to err on the side of action and came back for a second week.

Most of the same men were back this time. After dinner, some volunteers went off into a quiet room to talk to any of the men who wanted to talk and get prayer requests. Not as many as I would have hoped came by. Some of them got distracted by taking a smoking break and shooting some basketball in the church gym. We did get a few who had a lot to say. We got the following prayer requests:

• Strength (to persevere).
  
• Submission (willingness to submit) to God.
  
• That the men would stick to the Odyssey program and finish what they started.
  
• To be able to go back to school and learn a trade.
  
• To be able to “stay the course”.
  
• To overcome selfishness in their life.
  
• Avoid binge drinking.
  
• Avoid binge spending of all their money.
  
• To be able to stick with a job.
  
• To better understand themselves.
  
• A tranquil mind.
  
• Eliminate worry about the future.
  
• One wanted to be able to return to Florida where he was from.
  
• Healing from depression and self pity.
  
• Avoid being financially irresponsible.

I hope you will join me in praying for this group of men trying to put their lives back together and get off the streets.

God, I pray that if it is Your will, You will bless these homeless men. Put a barrier around them to protect them from the Devil’s temptation. Put good influences around them to encourage them when they are tempted to go back to the life they want to leave. Use this group of homeless men who are sticking together in a mighty way make a positive difference in their lives. Heal them physically. Heal their broken relationships. Give them wisdom in the handling of their personal decisions and finances. Give them a peace that as they seek Your will they should not worry about the future. Give them the strength to endure trials and grow in the process. Grow their faith and help them to put Your will first in their lives and learn to submit to You. Above all, lead any of them who have not yet accepted Your Son Jesus as their Savior to seek You. Draw them all close to You. I pray also for all the volunteers who are ministering to them. Give us all the strength and wisdom and patience to help them. Use us to be a blessing to them. This we ask in Your name. Amen.

What the Homeless Taught Me About Prayer

There is a really excellent article by Phillip Yancey entitled The Word on the Street
What the homeless taught me about prayer.

Here are a few quotes to entice you to talk a look...

"If you're writing a book about prayer, you should hang around the homeless for a while," said my wife, a veteran of inner-city ministry. "Street people pray as a necessity, not a luxury."

Her advice made sense, especially after I interviewed Mike Yankoski, a Westmont College student who, along with a friend, left school for five months to live on the street. (His book, Under the Overpass, tells the story.) Mike told me that homeless people, having hit bottom, don't waste time building up an image or trying to conform. And they pray without pretense, a refreshing contrast to what he found in some churches.
...

As I listened to the homeless relate their prayers, I was struck by the prayers' down-to-earth quality—indeed, their resemblance to the Lord's Prayer. "Give us this day our daily bread": They all had stories about running out of food, praying, and then finding a burrito or uneaten pizza. "Deliver us from evil": Living on mean streets, these believers pray that daily. "Forgive us our trespasses": Deep down in each lay buried secrets of shame and regret.

Why Don't I Seek the Outcast?

My pastor preached a sermon tonight on Zacchaeus. I must admit that I had not read the story in a long time and the extent of my knowledge of him is limited pretty much to a vague memory of the old song from vacation Bible school when I was a kid. Zacchaeus was a wee little man and a wee little man was he..

The thing which jumped out at me tonight was not really about Zacchaeus but instead how Jesus treated Zacchaeus. Jesus sought out Zacchaeus. Jesus didn’t seek out the righteous religious leaders or even “regular” members of the religious community. Jesus chose to seek out the outcast Zacchaeus. He was the man that everyone in the community despised because he collected the taxes for the Romans.

I was reminded that Jesus did this all the time. He actively sought the people who had strayed far from God and sought to bring them back close. In Matthew 9 there is a related verse on this topic, "It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. 13But go and learn what this means: 'I desire mercy, not sacrifice.'[a] For I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners."

I found myself feeling like I needed to do some healthy re-examination of my priorities. If I was traveling to a new town, would I seek out the outcasts to visit with? Or... would I seek out the “church people” who were a lot like me? My track record is clearly on the side of doctoring the healthy. (heavy sigh) In other words, my own life is too often like the Pharisees and not like Jesus.

So what am I going to do about it?

God, I pray that You will reveal to me some practical way that I can more often seek out the person who has strayed far from You and make myself available to the Holy Spirit to reach someone lost. Prepare me and enable me to venture out of my comfort zone. Give me the faith I need and the spiritual discernment I need to let You use me for Your purposes. Amen.